Have you ever bought a phone off Ebay?

[Aleria]

slightly off topic, but this is something i've been wondering for a bit. When you buy a phone offline (like ebay), do you just take it to your service provider and have them activate it for you? I've been thinking about getting a smart phone but my contract isn't up for another year or maybe 14 months or something.

Usually you can activate it either online on your carriers website if you already have an account and just want to swap out your current phone for the new phone, or just give them a call and tell them you'd like to activate a new phone and tell them which line the phone will be on.

I've bought nearly all of my cells online and upgraded that way, going through the website is always soooooo easy rather than wasting time on the phone or going into the store to deal with them in person.

And if you are in dire need of transferring lots of contacts, etc and don't have a data cable to do so, then that's about the only time I'd recommend visiting the carrier store as they usually will do the transfer for free to your new phone. They don't particularly care where you buy your phone from as long as it's not marked stolen or illegal in their system they are just happy to be draining your bank account every month

Apparently I'm not just a computer person that works as an IT specialist hehe as I seem to be getting further and further into this whole phone thing as time goes by, both cellular and otherwise. I guess I pretty much just geek out over anything technical and have to know absolutely everything there is to know about it, but I do find it fun to help other people out setting things up and all that, especially when it comes to finding good deals on these things as I know how ridiculous the prices can get. I am totally the master at buying everything electronics related at the cheapest possible prices