Jasjar- Anyone?

[pdaided]

I'm looking at buying one unlocked to use on my Cingular account here in the states.
Anyone have any advice or .....done this yet?>
Thanks

[ADBrown]

That's not going to work very well, I'm afraid. The JASJAR doesn't support the 850 MHz frequency, so you're going to have little or no coverage in most of the country. On top of that, it doesn't support Cingular's EDGE or UMTS networks, meaning you'll be limited to GPRS for data.

[pdaided]

Thank You. Why no 850?
I thought my Cingular 551 Motorola phone worked here or in Europe?
Thanks

[Janak Parekh]

Thank You. Why no 850?
That's the million dollar question. And it's frustrating. It looks like the Universal (i.e., the JasJar) is triband, and so we need to wait for a North American version to get GSM 850 support. Strangely enough, most other devices being released today are quadband. Maybe they didn't have enough space to build in an antenna that optimizes all 4 bands.

--janak

[ADBrown]

Thank You. Why no 850?
I thought my Cingular 551 Motorola phone worked here or in Europe?
Thanks

Yes, it does. It's quad-band, meaning that it uses all four of the common GSM frequencies. North America uses 850 and 1900 MHz, Europe and some other places use 900 and 1800 MHz. The JASJAR supports 900/1800/1900, as well as the 2100 MHz UMTS networks used in Europe but not over here.

Here in the US, the only carrier whose network is entirely built on 1900 MHz is T-Mobile, so you could use a JASJAR on them, but you'd get almost significantly less reception on Cingular.

As for your original question of why not 850 MHz, I have no solid answer. Perhaps Janak is right and they didn't have space. Perhaps they decided to save money by only using a tri-band chipset on the grounds that the thing probably wouldn't sell as well in the US as in Europe. Either way, it's not much use here until and unless they come up with a version that includes 850 MHz.