vB Easy Archive - phone that works in Europe

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phone that works in Europe - help!
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Posted by: pylot

I'll be travelling to Europe this summer and will need a phone, mostly for emergency. I'm looking for a GSM phone that has very good RF, is at least tri-band (quad band preffered) and cheap (say it costs less than $75-100 on eBay) Medium-importance features: good battery life (talk/standby), data capable, lightweight. I don't care about color screen, games, camera, etc.

Posted by: TriBand81

Do you have a brand preference? If not, consider an Ericsson r520m.

It's real old-school but a lot of people use this phone just to roam in Europe.

Try the Phonescoop Phone Finder:

http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/finder.php

http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/fi...=s&wor=r&f56r=e

Posted by: Levent

buy any triband (900/1800/1900) old phones.

Posted by: TriBand81

Some perform better than others

, so the r520m is one model to look into.

Posted by: pylot

Thanks! Yeah, the Ericsson looks good. And it's so cheap

First I thought I wanted a quad band phone, but then realized that the GSM network in the US probably won't have a greater coverage than the CDMA for at least several years.

Posted by: TriBand81

It depends on where in the Bay Area you use your phone the most. CDMA probably does better up in the Oakland Hills and the very hilly portions of the City such as Noe Valley where GSM tends to be a bit problematic since you don't have analog fallback.

However, I've found GSM 1900 to work quite well along the Peninsula (i.e. Redwood City) and up around Portola Valley and 280.

Just go with the r520m, if you have more questions, ask the Sony Ericsson users over in the SE forum, a number of them had the r520m or the T39 back in the day and those 2 models are still sought after these days as backup phones.

http://sonyericsson.howardforums.com