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A: It's not quite as easy as just
throwing on a different sweater, but many cell phone companies
enable you to use more than one handset with the same phone number.
So a person can conceivably carry an e-mail device like BlackBerry
during work hours, then switch to a slender flip phone at night.
The process varies, depending on the service
provider, and there are a few minor limitations as to which handsets
can be used interchangeably.
Most important to remember, though, is that
each device you want to use needs to be part of your wireless
company's device lineup. A Sprint phone won't work with a T-Mobile
account, and so on. There are some ways to work around this
obstacle, but the process won't appeal to most consumers.
Among the nation's biggest carriers, AT&T Inc.,
Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA all enable their subscribers to
move a phone number from handset to handset. But at Sprint Nextel
Corp., only older phones in Sprint's handset lineup can be swapped
in this fashion.
The process is identical for customers of AT&T
and T-Mobile, both of which use the globally dominant GSM technology
for their cellular networks and phones.
With GSM, a customer's phone number and account
information are stored on a SIM, a removable smart card about the
size of a postage stamp that fits in a slot within the battery
compartment.
The size of the card and the slot is identical
on all GSM phones. So to use multiple phones, all a customer needs
to do is remove the SIM from one phone and insert it into the back
of another.
There are a few minor caveats, as the
formatting of the SIM does vary slightly in some cases with
higher-end phones such as a BlackBerry or a T-Mobile SideKick, which
feature customized capabilities for e-mail and text messaging. If
you take the SIM from a regular phone, for example, and insert it in
a BlackBerry, you'd be able to make calls or access a mobile Web
page, but you wouldn't be able to use it for the BlackBerry e-mail
service.
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 At Verizon Wireless, the process for switching
phones is handled entirely online rather than on the phone itself.
That's because Verizon's service is based on a technology called
CDMA that doesn't involve a SIM. Instead, a user's phone number and
account information is stored within the device's internal
circuitry.
To swap phones, a Verizon customer needs to
register for online account access through the same portal that
users can view or pay their monthly bills.
On that online site, there's an "Activate Phone"
link, which asks you to input an 11-digit code called an ESN for the
device you'd like to work with your phone number. The ESN, unique to
each handset, can be found printed inside the battery compartment.
The user needs to wait 10 minutes for the
switch to work its way through Verizon's systems, then type in "
228" on the new phone and press "send," which triggers an over-the-air
activation for that handset. To switch the phone number back to the
original handset or yet another, you'd go back to the Web and repeat
the process. Verizon Wireless says that customers who like to swap
handsets may want to subscribe to Back-Up Assistant, a service that
moves their contacts from one device to another for $1.99 per month.
Sprint, which also uses CDMA technology, offers
a similar Web-based process to Verizon's, but again only with older
phone models. Newer models equipped for Sprint's Vision multimedia
data services cannot be swapped online.
[Text copied
from file received from AP
Digital; By Bruce Meyerson, AP business writer]
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