14 DAY TRIAL // GSM is the most frequently used mobile standard in the world, while in some countries(like the US) two standards are available, GSM and CDMA. Depending on which carrier you choose, like Spint and Verzon Wireless for CDMA or At&t and T-Mobile for GSM, you'll have to get an appropriate phone, with the vast majority of phones only working on one of the two standards.
Russian mobile operator Skylink has teamed up with Korean mobile phone manufacturer Ubiquam in order to put an end to this and provide the U520, a handset that works on both standards.
The U520 is a dual mode CDMA 450 and GSM 900/1800 mobile phone that will work on both CDMA 2000/1x/EV-DO and GSM/GPRS 900/1800 Mhz networks.
As for download/upload speeds, on CDMA EV-DO the phone will support up to 2.4 data transfer while on GSM in addition to the regular voice calls it will provide as little as up to 80kbps GPRS data transfer. Nevertheless, something is better than nothing at all, especially when at least in the US you can pretty much use the phone with any wireless carrier and switch between them whenever needed.
Other features of the Ubiquam U520 include a 2 megapixel camera with 16x digital zoom, 1/9 inch 262k color screen, a card slot for memory expansion, media player with support for MP3 and MPEG 4 files USB and Bluetooth for connectivity. The handset measures 110 x 49 x 11.3, weighs about 81.7 grams and doesn't look bad at all. There is no info regarding price or availability although since it's dual-mode it's bound to work practically everywhere.