Cell Phone locked??

I have a cell phone that i want to sell on e-bay but im not sure if it is still loked into a contract. I lost my phone so went to verizon and they sent me a new one, i activated it and used it for about a week when i found my old phone. So i then began using my old phone again, so i still have the new one but im not sure if it is still under a service contract.

I'm not with Verizon so I'm not positive how they work. Was your phone replaced under a warranty or service plan? If not, you probably signed a new contract unless you paid full price. If you didn't pay anything and didn't see verbiage during activation that implied a new contract, then you're probably not under a new one.

AT&T shows you on their website if your account is still under contract, I would imagine Verizon does something similar.

If you're out of contract, most carriers will unlock your phone for you upon request. Barring that, you can find numerous online merchants who will unlock it for you, or sell you the software to do it. For some phones you might even find free unlocking instructions.

What kind of phone is the one you want to sell?

goof,

You can sell your phone on ebay no problem. Since you have switched back to your old cell phone, the new one that they sent you is just sitting there with no service attached.

Obviously do a master reset to clear out all of your numbers, personal information, etc. and set it back to the original manufacturer settings prior to shipping. You know, the whole protect your privacy thing )

When the ebay buyer receives it, they will simply call Big Red, give them the ESN (Electronic Serial Number - either in DEC format, 11 numbers or HEX format, combo of 8 letters and numbers) and have them activate the cell phone on their service plan.

Yeah, I guess it went without saying that you don't HAVE to unlock a phone to sell it, because another Verizon customer can always buy your phone and reuse it. I figured that was obvious so didn't mention it.

However after jwwws' post, it also dawned on me that this is Verizon and thus CDMA, correct? Unlocking wouldn't gain you a much wider market appeal since the other big carriers (AT&T, TMobile) are now GSM. A CDMA phone won't work at all on a GSM network. Verizon, Alltel, and Sprint are the last of the major brand CDMA carriers, and Sprint is a PCS network, not cellular, so the phone wouldn't work with them either. So really the only market you'd open up to by unlocking would be Alltel, unless there are still some small localized "mom & pop" carriers that do CDMA. And Alltel isn't very big by comparison.

CDMA is dead from an international standard perspective. The only thing keeping it alive this long is the size of the Verizon market -- if it weren't for them, it would have long ago gone extinct. The rest of the world has long been GSM, and that's where North America is going as well. This makes unlocking a CDMA phone a largely impractical exercise, I would think.