In yet another illustration of how screwed up the wireless industry is, it is very common, if not universal, for wireless carriers to “lock” the phones they sell. On GSM phones, the locking mechanism works by checking the brand of the SIM card against the phone’s internal carrier brand. If the SIM card brand does not match the phone’s carrier brand, the phone will not operate. I’m not really sure want the logic is behind locking phones (besides just annoying their customers), since even though carriers subsidize phones these subsidies usually require the customer to sign up for a long-term contract. That is, the carrier “earns back” the subsidy over the life of the contract.

As I wrote about here, I recently purchased a used Nokia 8390 that was advertised as a “Cingular phone”. Before the Nokia arrived in the mail, I realized that my SIM card was an AT&T card. Realizing that my soon-to-arrive phone was a Cingular phone, I knew that my AT&T SIM card would not work (never mind the logic that Cingular and AT&T are now one in the same). In order to prepare for the Nokia’s arrival, I ran down to the Cingular store and had my AT&T SIM card swapped for a Cingular SIM.

Of course, this took more than an hour since I had to wait in line forfrigginever at the Cingular store. Wanna know why your wireless bill is so high? Just watch the action at any wireless retailer… it’s like the DMV in slow motion.

Needless to say I was not pleasantly surprised when the Nokia arrived in its original AT&T Wireless packaging. Friggin’ classic.

Fortunately, it turns out that Nokia phones are pretty easy to hack. Hacking removes the carrier’s lock allowing it to work on any network (assuming the phone operates on the correct frequency). A quick search on the net brought me to this article over on the O’Reilly site. Some of the links in this article are a little out of date, but the one that counts leads to the appropriately named Unlockme site in the UK.

From the Unlockme site, I downloaded a copy of DCT4 Code Calculator 5.4 , inputed the required information and entered the calculated unlocking code into the Nokia. It worked like a charm! Now my new Cingular SIM would work with the Nokia.

One word of caution: You only get a few chances to enter in the correct code, so read through all of the instructions before trying to unlock your phone. Although the instructions aren’t very clear, carefully reading both the O’Reilly article and the information on the Unlockme site will probably get you safely to unlocked phone nirvana.

If you’re looking for some interesting podcasts, you might try Stanford on iTunes. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now and they’ve steadily been adding more and more content.

Using iTunes as a distribution platform is a great way to get content out onto the internet in a way that a lot of users are familiar with. However, there is one huge problem — it’s proprietary. Why is this a problem? Well, as Jon Udell notes, you can’t link directly to a file in the Stanford iTunes store (I tried, as suggested at the bottom of Jon’s post, to Right-Click -> Copy iTunes Music Store URL, but that command doesn’t seem to capture anything). And what’s even worse for people that don’t own an iPod, the Stanford audio files are encoded using Apple’s non-DRM .M4A file format. If you want to listen to these files away from your desktop, you’ve got to have a iPod or convert them to .MP3 (which is painful, but doable).

But even with the proprietary problems, there’s some great, free content available at Stanford on iTunes, so check it out.