technology gone wrong
Why complain so much about your phone? Do US providers really lock you to a single model? Here, in the less-enlightened lands (we use that nasty GSM stuff instead of CDMA), all that ties you to your provider is a little inch by half-inch card with a chip on it. If you want to put that into a five- or six-year old Ericsson GA628, you can go right ahead and do so.