The cell phone market in the United States is drastically different from the cell phone market in the vast majority of the rest of the world. In the United States, you buy a heavily subsidized phone, and then are locked into a contract for the next one to two years. In the rest of the world, you pay a steep price upfront for the phone and then very little for the services, usually with the freedom to switch providers at will. Part of the issue with the US cell network is that we have two types of cell phone networks, two technologies - GSM and CDMA. Verizon and sprint are on CDMA, AT&T and T-mobile are on GSM. Most of the rest of the world is exclusively on some band of GSM.

While the two competing technologies help facilitate lock-in, they are far from the only reason for it. AT&T locks their phones in a way that makes them unable to be used on the T-mobile network, with the iPhone being one of the most famous examples. Obviously, there’s a downside to this exclusivity, it results in less choice for the consumer. However, there are some benefits - if you intend on staying with one cell phone provider for an extended period of time, getting a cheaper phone is not not necessarilly a bad trade off, and if you’re looking for a new one, its worth hunting around to try to find a good deal.

This can be time consuming, but fortunately, there’s a website that can help you find cheap cell phones. The webmaster scours the web and promotional advertising in order to find those offering particularly good rebates and has found some amazing deals - get $50 back when you get a Samsung Upstage, or $50 with a motorola Q if you sign on with Alltell.

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