I just moved to Beijing and I can't find any information on cell phone carriers so I can compare prices. A Chinese friend of mine says she has CDMA which has free incoming calls. I guess China Mobile is the biggest carrier here and they are GSM.

Any tips for a newbie in the area?

Thanks,
Bidhere23

If you have a GSM phone, this is a great resource for travelers:

http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_cn.shtml

Notice that there are two mobile operators (China Mobile / China Unicom). They both run on GSM 900. For most Americans, this means you will have to have a "quad-band" GSM phone. Many of the newer models these days are quad-band, but you should check on your specific phone model.

This will allow you to roam on both of these networks paying whatever your cell carrier charges for roaming in China. Now, you may want to look at getting a local SIM card to use in your phone once you arrive as that may make dialing/receiving considerably cheaper.

towards the end of last month, there was a thread on the same topic in another forum (maybe travel technology), in which i commented on a promotion from unicom that i learned about through a friend and subsqeuntly via sms. basically, all calls to the us and a number of other foreign countries cost y1 per minute if you pay a monthly fee of around y50. also, pre paid service qualifies.

the downside of unicom is, of course, that its (cdma) network isn't all that stellar, but it wouldn't kill you to pick up a cdma phone to use as a backup.

more appropriate for your needs, and slightly more expensive, would be a postpaid plan from china mobile. just stop by one of their offices and they'll fill you in (plans start at around y50 per month and go up to around y1000). you need to have a local bank account and proof of residence (the psb form will suffice) in order to qualify.