With improvements to our mobile phones, we are now able to do more than ever before while on the move. We can almost do as much with our mobile hand set as we can when we are sitting in front of a computer.

This is great for mobile phone users, but are these advancements making our networks suffer? In the past, there have been ways to unlock mobile phones so they are usable on any network. This involved a lot of knowhow and in some cases, equipment. With the Android operating many phones use, there are apps available to do all this for us.

What Does this Mean?

Before there were apps that could unlock mobile phones, you needed to take your phone to a specialist to enable you to use it with other networks. If you bought a phone that was on an Orange network, you would need to unlock it to use it on say Vodafone. When a phone is â??unlockedâ??, you are free to take the best deal on call time, texts and data you can find, this is not good news for mobile networks, because they often subsidise the cost of handsets locked to their own networks. There are advantages for mobile phone manufacturers who use Android as an operating system. It is open source, there are no fees to include it with a handset. Most importantly, it allows developers to create apps for phones, which increases desirability.

The Unlock App

There are without doubt, apps that can unlock many mobile phones that nobody has heard of yet. The app that has made the news this week is from Project Voodoo and it is available for download on Google Play. The app will allow users of the new Galaxy S3 to unlock the sim so that the handset is usable on any network. There will always be an element of risk involved when you tamper with your mobile phoneâ??s manufacturer settings, but without experiment, there is no progression. The App has had more than 110 five star reviews posted by users in the short space of time it has been available for download from the Android Market (Google Play). Somebody is doing something right.

You can buy the phone sim-free straight from the shelf, although you may find it difficult to find stockists of unlocked mobiles. Most phone shops make the majority of their money by selling contracts to customers and not through selling unlocked handsets. The question is; will this damage the mobile phone industry? This is highly unlikely. It will make it slightly more competitive as mobile networks will need to compete on price even more. Customers who have signed a contract will be obliged to honour any number of months they have remaining. Most new customers will still prefer to have one carrier and one bill at the end of the month. There are only a small percentage of mobile phone users, who do not like the idea of monthly billing.

Not all Phones are Locked

There are some phones that are never subsidised by the mobile networks, because they them as having little appeal to users. Whether or not this is an oversight on their part is yet to be determined. The Nokia 808 PureView has a 41 mega-pixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens. Many people have said that it is more of a camera than a cell phone. This may be why the networks have avoided it. The Nokia is obviously not a cheap phone, so Nokia may have shot themselves in the foot with this one.

There are many sim free mobile phones making an impact in the market. What is right for you may not be right for someone else.