Question about bad ESN phones and international usage.

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Hey everyone:

So, here's my situation. My brother-in-law lives in the Middle East and loves HTC phones. Unfortunately, it takes forever to get new HTC phones there, and when they do get them, they're absurdly overpriced. My wife and I want to surprise him with a Sprint Touch Pro 2, but I had a couple of questions first, and was hoping you guys could help me out.

1.) Does it matter if the phone has a bad ESN? We were thinking of just grabbing a bad ESN phone off of ebay or craigslist, since he'll be using a SIM card in a different country anyway.

2.) All I need to do to make this work is just pop in his SIM card and tell the phone "GSM only," right? As I understand it, the Sprint TP2 is sim-unlocked but can't use US-based radios; since he lives in the Middle East there won't be any problems there.

Can anyone let me know if this plan is feasible? Thanks in advance.