416dude said:

Will it work on a phone that supports 1900 Mhz but not 850 Mhz GSM band?

Yes, because 1900mHz is still a North American band. Also if you are using an unlocked phone. Generally, you will find the 1900mHz band in urban areas. So if you bring your phone into the rural areas where there might be only the 850mHz band, your phone won't work.

Any Motorola cell phone, or any phone that has a spot capable to hold a sim card will work.

Not quite. The phone has to be (a) unlocked (or locked to Rogers (not Fido!)) and (b) operate on at least the 850/1900 MHz North American GSM bands.

Can SpeakOut phones be used with Rogers?

Yes.

http://themainframe.ca/iphone

The procedure's pretty much the same for any other GSM phone.

http://www.unlockedgsmphones.c.....%20is.html

Although they reference the US networks in their examples, most if not all your questions will be answered here.

Speakout uses the rogers network here in Canada. As does Fido. These are the GSM networks.

To buy unlocked, quadband GSM phones see http://www.puremobile.ca/

That is one of my favourite sites. GSMarena is the site that made me decide on which phones to get. Here's another one:

http://www.cellphones.ca/

http://www.gsmarena.com/

What do you think about it?

To summarize what I said earlier:

Speakout can use either (1) an unlocked GSM phone or (2) a GSM phone locked to Rogers. So, if your friend has a phone that he/she used to use with Rogers in the past 5 years or so, then it should work with Speakout.

To use a GSM phone in N.America, you will need one with one or both of the N.American GSM frequencies - 850 and 1900 MHz.

Like slomo said - find the phone you want, and see what frequencies it uses and if it is unlocked or locked to Rogers. Simple as that.

HOWEVER, GSM phones are sometimes locked to the company that you bought it from, i.e. if you bought a phone from Rogers then the phone can only be used with Roger's SIM cards. Usually you can unlock the phone so it can be used with any SIM card.

NOTE: Phones will recognize a Speakout SIM as a Rogers SIM, so if your phone is locked to Rogers, then you can use it with Speakout.

Also, make sure that you can use the phone in N.America - meaning that the phone uses at least the 2 GSM frequencies in N.America (850 and 1900). Some phone are quad band, so you're fine. Others are tri-band where it may have one or both of the N.American frequencies. I'd suggest that it has both the N.American ones. Some phones only have 2 frequencies, either the 2 N.American ones (850 & 1900) or the 2 European one.