Upgrading an old mobile phone

[Dom Tuk]

I have 2 mobile phones about 5 years old, pay as you go, with BT Cellnet. They are old 'U' Phillips phones. My wife and i hardly use them. I wish to upgrade them to Nokia phones and the O2 shop said thats no problem we can sell you the replacement Nokia phones and you just transfer the sim cards and you can retain the credit and the number. Can i buy any nokia phones (say off ebay) and transfer my sim card and will that be OK??. Do i have to go through the O2 shop to retain the credit and tel. number or is it all carried on the Sim card. Is there any restrictions on the nokia models i can use. thanks

[j2buttonsw]

I think you can use any phone so long as it is "unlocked". The sim card knows that you are O2 pay as you go, not the phone.

[Sammy Snake]

I agree.  You just need to buy an 'unlocked' phone.  or buy any Nokia that takes your fancy and if it's from O2 that's fine, just put your old sim card in but if its not an O2 phone you can get them 'unlocked' for about �10. 

As mentioned above, the credit/phone numebr etc are stored on the sim and not on the actual phone.

[Ralph]

If you get a Nokia that needs unlocking, it can be done cheaper than �10, in fact there's an ad on the right offering to give you a code for �3. However, a bit of research will show that there are unlock code generators on the web that'll do the job for free. I posted a link to one such page fairly recently in answer to someone elses question.

If you're upgrading to a new phone from a fairly old one, there may be one other thing to watch for. A lot of the old phones use a 5 volt sim card where the new ones use a 3.3 volt, the actual numbers may not be right but the general idea is. This happened to me when I bought a new sim free nokia. I rang up T-Mobile and explained the situation, they asked me to credit my account with �10 which they never took (don't know if they were supposed to) and they sent me a new sim with the same number. Easy!