If you have to do research on cell phones like I do, you'll eventually find that any phone can have multiple models existing in the wild. For each market, say Asia, Japan, the US, China... they released a different model. Most of the times, it supported different frequency bands, because some country like the US, Korea,... have cell phone standard that separated them from the rest of the world. Other times, it was a model exclusive to a network, a company, an event. Today, I wanted to tell a couple of stories involving phone models catering to different frequency bands.
Oneplus One: Holy grail of phone design, price-performance ratio, practically useless as a phone
This was back in 2014. I just finished my university entrance test and got into a major university in my city. So I was given fairly big budget to purchase my favorite thing. I chose to buy a smartphone. I was the first of my family to get a smartphone. However, this was for my second one. The first one I bought beforehand was a Nokia Lumia 820. It was a Windows Phone, because my friend convinced me to the platform. It was nice and fast, but also lacking in applications. The phone in question, Oneplus One, was pushed heavily in online marketing. There was an event back then which you typed in your email on their website and prayed to the lucky star to get an invite to buy their phone internationally. SO of course I didn't win.
I later found a model that was selling at a nearby store. Costed about the same as the one on their website, which was $350. To put it into perspective, a phone with a similar performance to Oneplus One was double the price. So you can see the value Oneplus offered. Anyway, I bought the phone. I inserted my SIM card in, not connected. I tried multiple times, including restarting the phone, switch on and off Airplane Mode, change Select Network to Manual. I found out later that maybe the model I bought was a Chinese one, not an international one, so the frequency bands might be different. Figured, since there was only a limited number of the latter in the world due to that event. I searched for ways to fix this. ROM hacks, firmware updates, modem fix, ... many ways. I tried them all. This was during the era when custom ROMs, which were customized Android OSes, reigned supreme, and was a way to boost a phone's performance because of early 2010s' lackluster specs on smartphones. Nowadays, it's becoming harder since phones have become cheaper, more capable, and more secure. Forums like XDA-Developers were where I frequented to find ways to fix the phone. At one point, I even stuck a paperclip in to try to fix the SIM card slot. Hilariously, the phone store couldn't fix it. So I had to fix it by slowly pulling it out. I successfully pulled it, but the phone still didn't work on my network. So I was stuck with a Lumia and a 5.5-inch tablet. But at least it had a Snapdragon 801, a beast of an ARM CPU at the time. At least until I later changed to Coolpad Note 3 Lite after I broke my Lumia 820. FYI, the Coolpad phone was horrible and slow.
Sometime later, I pulled the Oneplus One out for my sister after retiring it long ago, gave it an update to Android 6 and then it can accept my SIM card, albeit only 3G was possible.
Oneplus Nord CE 2 Lite: How not paying attention to About Phone can cost you big time
Just last June, 2023. I planned to buy this phone in anticipation for my travel to the US. I needed a phone that could use the US cellular network without buying from the US, because I thought it would be expensive. I checked the specs of the phone online, cross-compare to other phones of the brand. I was looking for headphone jack and dual-SIM, because I hate this trend of removing what should already be possible on thin phones. I checked out 8 Pro, 7 Pro, Nord N20 and found this one fit, and somebody resold this used one for about 3.2 million VND. So I took the chance and bought it. After a few hours, I innocently searched for the model, CPH2381, seems that there were 2 models of this phone. And I was hit with results from Amazon India and Indian phone stores. While the other model, CPH2409, was the international one.
Then something clicked. On the page they advertised this used phone, there was an image of the phone's About Phone page that said model CPH2381. So because of one little mistake*,* I took home a phone that will most likely be useless in the US, because it didn't support enough frequency bands from the US. And I can't take the phone back, because technically it still works here in Vietnam. So no dice. I ended up once again, gave this one to my sister so she could replace her aging Samsung Galaxy A7. There goes my birthday present.
What we can take away for these stories
- Probably pay more attention to the model if you are looking for a specific phone, since it's so rare and hard to find.
- Just to go the country you plan to go and buy the phone from there. Because now I have to pay double for a phone in the US, half for the Oneplus CE 2 Lite, half for whatever I will buy in the US to use.
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