It’ll almost certainly work for calls, texts, and 2G/3G data. It’ll probably work for LTE data as well, but there’s more variability between regions there, so if she wants those faster speeds, that’s something she’d need to check.

Check out the attribution link at the bottom of the post — it has the location, date and other info listed. 🙂

Hey James,

Good point, do your research before your hand over your cash. I’ve heard some stories about the Galaxy S3 being overly locked down from a couple of carriers, though never with the general OS. Most phones will give you the option to change languages and whatnot right in the menus. Worst case, you might have to load a generic ROM for your Android device.

One thing I’m not keen on with the Google Play store, is that it gives you access to the country store based on your SIM card, not your language or main Google account settings. For example, I bought my Galaxy Nexus in Thailand, and since I had a Thai SIM, it gave me the Thai store (not the Canada/USA store I wanted). You need to root to get around this. Was this your issue?

Samsung provides different firmware for different countries and as I found to my cost, this can mean a crippled OS. In my case it meant that I had just bought a phone that couldn’t install English-language apps! Apple does something similar and I’m sure the other mobile-phone manufacturers do too.

Samsung provides different firmware for different countries and as I found, this can mean a crippled OS. In my case it meant that I had just bought a phone that couldn’t install English-language apps! Apple does something similar and I’m sure the other mobile-phone manufacturers do too.

Careful of the region coding and also the format (PAL vs NTSC). If you buy a player, try to get one that is region free AND converts NTSC to PAL or vice versa. Thanks for the comment!