Nokia 8910 and GSM???

[Kaosinla]

I was hooked on the Nokia 8910 (along with the 8855) design and wanted to buy it where I live in California. To my dismay, it only operated on gsm 900/1800. My questions are: Do phones ever get updated to work in more modes. For example, this phone being updated to work with GSM 1900? Also, why are phones like this not made to be compatible for the United States GSM systems? Are we that small of a market? This question may be unanswerable, but it is puzzling to think that Nokia doesn't follow other tri-band phone models and that there wouldn't be a profit in the U.S.

[Ton1]

No the phone has to have the RF module compatible to 1900 Mhz band. There are no updates whatsoever to change the frequency.
The US was the last country in the world to join the GSM technology. While the Europe and the rest of the world were using GSM 900/1800 Mhz for almost 10 years now, US was depeniding on older AMPs, DAMPS, CDMA and TDMA technologies (almost) not used anywhere in the world.
As a result the leading GSM phones manufactures did not take US in account and did not put the US 1900 Mhz band into their products.
There are few models supporting 900-1800-1900 bands like Nokia 8890, 7210.
It does not seem that US learned the lesson and FCC came up with new unique 850 Mhz GSM band also not compatible to anything else(!!!) in the world. So the manufactures have to put new unique band into their phones again (Nokia 6590i). The story with NTSC color TV system repeats itself and nobody seemed to learn a lesson.
I should mention that till the summer of 2002 we had a single GSM-1900 carrier called in different times Omnipoint-Voicestream-T-Mobile. They were first on the market for a few years now.