Hi,
I have a new cingular 7290, how do I determine if it is locked, and if so, how do I unlock it? I'm planning on traveling to Europe and wish to use a local provider's prepaid SIM card.

thanks,
Sam

The easiest way is to put in another carrier's SIM card before you leave home. If the card works (you will like either get to GSM or gprs, but not GPRS) it is unlocked.

When using a local prepaid SIM card, voice and SMS are easy; if you want to do Internet Browsing or E-Mail, you must make sure the carrier supports BlackBerrys and the card is provisioned for the BlackBerry Data Service.

Traditionally, Cingular devices do not come locked. I don't know for a fact if this has changed with the 7290 though.

Recently purchased a Cingular 7290. The store checked with their tech support group and verified that 7290 are unlocked from the box. Have not actually try to put another SIM in though.

I have a Cingular 7290 - it is not SIM locked nor are any of their phones.

You are correct, I won a Cingular Blackberry 7290 from Ebay and able to use my TMobile service on it.

NONE of the 7290's are locked. You can drop in any sim you want.

It's a moving target. First of all it is changing all the time (Turkcel came onboard today). A lot depends on your carrier's roaming agreements - T-Mobile has very good international roaming; AT&T is OK, and Cingular barely publishes them.

Mark Rehjon has a thread somewhere which details which BB models work best where (the 7230 is a better "international" BB thatn the 7280, but the 7280 can work better in North America, for example).

Best thing to do is check with your carrier for their roaming agreement, and then proceed sceptically. I travel extensively and sometimes my BB works where I don't think it will (in a forest in Thailand) and doesn't work where it should (downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia).

By and large Europe and the UK are great - excellent coverage - if your BB has the right bands and your carrier has roaming agreements :)

ATT is Cingular now.

If you buy an AT&T BlackBerry TODAY it is SIM card locked.
If you buy a Cingular BlackBerry TODAY it is SIM card unlocked.

No one has officially stated what the new Cingular's "Raising the Bar" policy is going to be regarding locking or unlocking BlackBerrys.

It's a coverage issue. I've found out that Cingular will not fully integrate the ATT towers with its system for another 2 years or so -- that is, until all of the now Cingular customers with ATT contracts and ATT devices eventually ALL migrate to Cingular contracts and Cingular devices. In the meantime, ATT towers are as alien to Cingular customers as Sprint and Verizon towers. ATT has much better tower coverage than Cingular in my area -- so I'm trying to figure out how to get my Cingular 7290 to "home" in on ATT towers, instead of Cingular towers.

As far as I was told, Cingular has setup "free roaming" with ATT. You Cingular phone may have a preference on Cingular tower but you will also pick up ATT towers and no roaming charge will be incurred and vice versa. That being said, without some "integration", I am not sure your call will hop back and forth between Cingular and ATT tower during the same call. No one I talked to are technical enough to answer that question.

Legally Cingular owns AT&T.
The technology lags behind...

Cingular's "free roaming" with ATT, and other carriers, is no different than what Cingular customers had before the merger. There's been no improvement in coverage for Cingular customers, and won't be for years, that I can see. The problem with Cingular's "free" roaming is that Cingular requires your unit to be almost totally out of coverage with its towers, before it allows you to roam to another tower, no matter how powerful a signal an adjacent alien tower may be emitting. So I'd rather be "homed" into the ATT towers, and roam onto Cingular when its towers are stronger, which is seldom the case in my area.

I've tried to switch carriers manually on my 7290, as suggested in other threads, but my device does not allow this function. The carrier is stuck on Cingular, and there's no option to opt out. Same when I do roam onto an alien carrier's towers, and I'm trying to get back to Cingular manually (in my case because I live on the Texas side of the Mexican border and the alien towers are Telcel and something called APU.

Interesting. I understand the normal roaming signal rule. I was under the assumption that they relaxed the signal strength roaming rule a little bit to let you pick up the stronger of between Cingular or ATT towers since ATT towers are not really "alien towers" anymore.