How to unlock Samsung SCH-A650 cell phone

Have you tried the phone's owners manual, or its online documentation? Dunno if what you're looking for is there, but those would be the logical places to start looking.

well, the company "telus" locks them so we are forced to buy ringtones and games from them. It's a joke. There is a way around this but I donno how.

I see. Well, I'm sorry, then - I won't get into how to defeat that sort of lock, and I doubt you'll find anyone on A2K who will - its more or less a legal thing. Hope you understand.

Oh it's not illegal to unlock it at all!!!
If it was I woudn't be asking. They just make it inconvenient so we buy their product. It's illegal for them to ban 3rd party vendors. If I had money I would sue them.

I haven't looked at your provider's EULA, but I would be unsurprised to find continued use of the service following intentional subversion of their pre-installed software would put the user in breach of contract. As I said, I haven't read the EULA, but I strongly suspect the suits-and-books crowd employed by your provider made that part fairly explicit when they crafted the agreement.

A sidebar here - that you now are displeased by conditions and/or provisions of service standard with your provider, it occurs to me you apparently didn't read the EULA and other contract provisions very well before committing to the contract. While there's no argument the drafters of such contracts often go to extraordinary lengths to protect their own interests, no consumer out there has any excuse for ignoring, or claiming never to have heard, the warning "Read the fine print" - the Romans had a term for that a couple millenia ago; Caveat Emptor. Whether or not you got what you thought - for whatever reason - you were paying for, in all likelihood you've got what you signed for.

Check out CNet's review of the phone, consumer reviews usually have little tricks like that!