Question about bad ESN phones and international usage.

spectheintro · #1 (**permalink**) 11-24-2009, 01:23 AM

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.

spectheintro · #2 (**permalink**) 11-24-2009, 03:20 AM

Anybody?

**Dr.8820** · #3 (**permalink**) 11-24-2009, 03:44 AM

from what the unlocker team says, the esn doen't matter and it can still be unlocked http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...05#post5004705 post #45

**imnuts** · #4 (**permalink**) 11-24-2009, 06:36 AM

Bad ESN phones would likely just have issues being added to Sprint/Verizon here in the US and shouldn't have any issues anywhere else. If it was a Sprint phone, you probably would be able to just put the new SIM in and be fine. Verizon TP2 you may need to unlock prior to doing that.

spectheintro · #5 (**permalink**) 11-24-2009, 07:45 PM

Awesome, thanks guys.