Buying a smartphone in the U.S. to use in Germany

Hi fellow TtGers,

In January I'm off to New York for a 4 day stopover before visiting Chile for 4 weeks - yippee!! When I get back in February, I will need to buy a new phone and am gonna plum for a Smartphone. My questions are these:

Am I able to buy one in NY and use that when I come back to Germany/UK? If so, is there anything I need to be aware of when chosing one?

Is it easy to buy one without a contract in the US? And in comparison to buying here, would i save much?

I have searched for this a bit online and have a vague idea of the answers but as I know there are sooooooooooooo many Americans on this site, I thought "Let's ask the experts!" ;-) to get a clearer idea of how realistic my plan is!!

Cheers in advance for any help
B'swishes

Brightondan

You can do this, but there are a couple things to keep in mind. Make sure that the phone is GSM and Quad-band, so it will work over here. Most of the good smartphones are. But in the US a significant portion of the carriers run CDMA, although all of them you would have to buy the phone from one of the carrier stores stc.
You can find unbranded unlocked phones, I can't recommend any stores in the US though. NY should have some good ones though.
Supposedly Chinatown is good for this? Some of the electronic stores will sell unbranded smartphones too from what I remember.
Nokia has a flagship store there too which you can get unlocked unbranded phones.

If you want cheap, I would say try Chinatown and have an idea of what phone you want and what you will pay.

It all depends on the Carrier and model of phone you want..

Also be very careful which carrier you do get it thru. Verizons network is based on CDMA
as such phones from them won't work on Europe's (The worlds) GSM networks..

If the specs say GSM, Quadband, or HSDPA then it should work here..

Thank you both for this - pretty much as I guessed. One other question: If it has a Satnav included, do you reckon that would not work here then? I mean a phone with such a thing is likely to fill out the other credentials for working here, but I heard that in America there's a different system to our GPS - is that correct?

Thanks again (to anyone!) for your advice.

Have a great weekend!

There is ony 1 world wide GPS system, and it works... WORLDWIDE...

What you might be thinking of is the Differential GPS systems. US has WAAS and EU has EGNOS.
Both however use the same freqs. and technology and are 100% compatible. However I haven't seen phones that support DGPS.
The biggest issue with US Satnav's are the maps. Some only do the US so getting/using other maps is next to impossible.
Stick with a generic well known system (Like TomTom) and you shouldn't have any problem.

Thanks Darkknight,
That's really helpful.

Well the phone I was looking at, for example, has an integrated TomTom - so that sounds promising. But naturally I'll ask while I'm there. And to think that a world wide system works...worldwide has just blown me away!! Ha ha

Have a good Saturday

P.S. I've just realised why I thought that about GPS - when I was looking at buying a Satnav it said for use in Europe - so I naturally presumed you couldn't use it outside - maybe it was just a map issue - that should be more solvable I think. But yes, TomTom is the way to go