NEC cracks down on unlocking phones
Right now there's sort of an unwritten rule about unlocking your handset so it'll work with a different carrier than the one you bought it from—the carriers and cellphone companies won't necessarily make it easy for you, but they also won't stop you from doing it, either. That might be changing. NEC is threatening to sue several companies in the UK that are offering to unlock NEC's ThreePay cellphones for people. Ostensibly they're doing this to protect their intellectual property (something to do with proprietary software on the phone), but can we just admit that the real reason they're doing this is to stop people from buying a heavily-subsidized phone from 3 and then jumping ship to another carrier? Carriers hate unlock phones since it makes it harder for them to make back those subsidies that they use to lure new subscribers in the first place. Normally they make you sign a one or two year service agreement to lock you down, but the ThreePay phones are part of a pay-as-you-go plan so you could conceivably pick up one of these phones for cheap and then use it with another wireless carrier.
[Via Mobile Gadget News]
