That G2 is compelling and that's an excellent price for a brand new one- cheapest I've seen. Looks like an excellent deal. But I didn't think it was compatible with T-Mobile LTE? I thought I had read that somewhere, but I guess I was wrong.
**When you say no aws 3G, what does that mean exactly?
I also looked on eBay and saw that one can buy unlock codes for the G2 for a couple of bucks. Are those legit?
T-mobile uses 1700 and 2100 for 3G. 1700 and 2100 = AWS bands. These used to be their primary 3G bands. If a phone did not have these, then you would not get 3G on t-mobile. About a year ago or more, they started rolling out 3G on 1900 band, so pretty much any ATT phone (ATT uses 850 and 1900 for 3G) will get 3G on t-mobile now. So now t-mobile uses 1700/2100 and 1900 for 3G.
The 1900 band might not be rolled out everywhere? And you are only getting access to 1 band instead of all of them, so your coverage/signal may not be as good. You would get full LTE though as the G2 supports all the bands for att and t-mobile. So if you are in a strong LTE market and barely ever go into 3G, you probably won't notice a difference.
Yes the unlock codes for $2 are good.
Here is what wikipedia lists for bands on the lg g2
ATT version d800
2g - GSM 850/900/1800/1900,
3g - UMTS 850/1900/2100
LTE - 1900(2)/1700(4)/850(5)/700(17)
and t-mobile d801
2g - GSM 850/900/1800/1900,
3g - UMTS 850/1700/1900/2100
LTE - 1900(2)/1700(4)/700(17)
So notice the bands are all the same except the att version doesn't have 1700 for 3g. All the t-mobile lte bands are on the att version.