The easiest way, dude...is to go to an Asian cellphone shop. They'll gladly do it for $10 and you don't even have to act sly about it either. It might not cost much to do it yourself with a program, but it's kind of a hassle for a quick fix. I'm not sure how much call you'll get trying to find an Asian cellphone store in South Carolina though. Never been there.

 

The Motorola's also require a subsidy code and they can be unlocked, easy as 1-2-3. It's that code that Motorola nor Cingular will give to the customers. The test point allows a person to extract that code directly from the phone without Motorola's help. In fact, T-mobile will give you the code, but they have to send a request for the code to Motorola. So in actuallity, I believe Motorola is the only one that knows the code.

 

The phones we are talking about unlocking are GSM only phones.

Verizon and Sprint use CDMA whish does not use a sim card. I'm not sure how you would go about it, but you would have to make sure the phone you buy is CDMA and not GSM.

 

Or return the phone and make sure the new one you buy will come unlocked.
Most places that sell the Asian models (excluding Japan and S. Korea, as they are CDMA like Verizon and Sprint. Plus their W-CDMA is most likely on a different freq. than ours will be.) will sell them unlocked.

You also need to make sure that you get a quad-band and not a triband. We (USA) use freq. 850/1900 here and they use 900/1800. Most US tribands are 850/1800/1900 and most Asian tribands are 900/1800/1900. Cingular and T-mobile are both starting to rely on the 850 band.

BTW, I was an engineer at Motorola for 4+ years

 

This isn't a code as much as a factory reset though....

 

You have to call and get the phone set up, which is a real pita. GSM phones rock since you can swap them so easily - its great when you go to other countries - buy a prepaid card and make local calls instead of roaming.

PS - I've heard you can buy prepaid gsm phones and just add your Sim card since they aren't locked to one particular Sim. Never really looked into that though...

 

When Mulder puts his Cingular sim card into his SunCom Motorola KRZR, a prompt pops up at startup that says Enter Subsidy Code. This is what he is looking for. This is what I am explaining for him so he can learn how to obtain it.

 

Go to any flea market area or wholesale area, walk in, it's usually only $10 and 10 minutes and you're off.


I wouldn't mess with buying programs and doing it myself, i think you need a cable for all the phones except nokias.

 

Still the best advice IMHO.

 

Try searching on www.howardforums.com