Cellphone unlocking for dummies
20050530 13:09 by javier
Say you are going to travel to Europe, but are unwilling to pay the insane roaming fees that some functional monopoly imposes in your country. So you buy an overseas GSM chip and drop it into you phone and it just works, right?
Wrong.
Your carrier is probably unwilling to let you use the phone you’re leasing from them -and even the one you outright bought from them with a nice markup- in some competitor network. Any competitor network. Even if it is half a world away.
Well, there’s help out there, and there is hope:
NokiaFREE calculator will provide unlocking codes for the most popular models from a dozen manufacturers, either online or in a standalone version.
However, if you succumbed to temptation and bought a Treo 600 just five months before the Treo 650 was released in your country, you might have to reflash it under your own risk.
Update 20050910: In an article aptly named 20 Things They Don’t Want You to Know, PC World writes about cellphone unlocking, but fails to even notice NokiaFree.
December 11th, 2007 at 17:22
That PC World article was a good one…
September 26th, 2008 at 0:44
Cellphone Unlocking is a noninfringing activity by the user, The main purpose of the software lock appears to be limited to restricting the owner’s use of the cell phone to support a business model, rather than to protect access to a copyrighted work itself.
September 26th, 2008 at 0:52
At the end, its all about the business model