Buy locked iphone 5 and unlock it?
Iphone 5 is ridiculously over priced in India. But it is available for $199 in the US. So if I buy it from there(I have a friend in the US) and unlock it I won't have to pay the carrier the rest right?
Nice idea but it won't work for two reasons:
First, the $199 price is the discount price you only get if you sign up for a 2 year contract, which means you will pay for a data/voice/texts plan every month for 2 years - and if you want to get out of the plan early, you pay a penalty of hundreds of dollars (basically about the amount the phone was discounted). You *can* buy the iPhone 5 without the new contract discount, but it'll be at least $600.
Second, most carriers don't let you unlock your phone right away, they require you to have it for several months first. You could get around this by purchasing an unlocked iPhone without a contract new directly from Apple - but it will be more than $199 (see above).
The only way to unlock is through the carrier or a service like iphoneunlockedcheap.com they do factory unlocks for cheap as well if you have ATT as your carrier.
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