What a load from a lot of posters here... The deal is as someone mentioned above that CDMA phones normally don't use a sim card. What this means to you is you cannot activate it through Orange as they use GSM (sim cards), but you can definitely activate it with Claro or Tricom as they do support CDMA (They used to be Verizon). Unlocking your phone should be a breeze (unless it is some rare phone). There are a gazillion places in The DR that will unlock your phone for a couple of hundred pesos and will even put in some credit for you to use. You don't need to activate it with a plan. You can use prepaid cards if you so desire. CDMA is not going anywhere any time soon in The US as Jalen mentioned. Both Verizon and Sprint (Number 1 and number 3 carriers) use it and they are not moving to GSM. AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM. Not sure about US Cellular (apparently they're CDMA as well) JDJones is wrong, wrong, wrong about Android. If anything you have a lot more choices to set up anything including email accounts (POP, Imap, etc...)