Telephone dialing and mobile phones

First, make sure you unlock your current phone before you leave home! It's likely to be cheapest to use it with a new SIM card you buy in Sweden.

My phone is getting old & I wanted a new iPhone 4. I was told a whole lot of different information. The woman at the Telia store said I would have to pay 6195 SEK cash and wait 5 weeks to order it- yikes!! I got out of there fast.

Fortunately, the guy at the Telenor store said that if I came back with a personnummer (working on it) and a letter from my employer showing that I made a good salary, he could sell me the iPhone at the regular price. The cost is 299SEK/mo for the minutes (at ~29 ores (cents)/minute, that's ~1000 minutes/month, which includes unlimted data) plus 200/month for the phone. So, 499 SEK/month for 2 years, at which point you own the phone and just pay for usage. Not bad considering the service alone for AT&T on my old iPhone was upwards of $80 (585 SEK)/month, plus texts!

I was not successful in calling AT&T back in the States and getting them to unlock it over the phone (not sure if this is actually possible or not).

I did not find anywhere in Lund that can unlock cell phones. I finally found a place in Malmo: Sweden PC-Phone at Admiralsgatan 16. 070-476 09 15, pc-phone@hotmail.com.

So for the time being, I bought a new SIM card (100 SEK) and got the World plan from Telenor (99 ore/min for international calls and 39 ore/min for calls within Sweden; you only pay for calls you place, not receive). When you buy this at the store, make sure they use your phone to call for you and change the menu settings so they are in English; otherwise you will not be able to call and check your balance. Apparently this cannot be done online.

Dialing phones:

Hold on to your hats here.

Let's say my cell number is: 07-123-456-78. Cell numbers are national numbers, that is, they do not have a region code.

To call this number from a Swedish phone: Dial directly, dropping the leading zero (7-12345678).

To call this number from Skype, dial the country code for Sweden (46) plus the number without the zero: 46-7-12345678.

To call this number from the US, dial 00 for international, then the country code & phone number: 00-46-7-12345678.