If so, wondering if I could ask a wee favour? 😀

I need to unlock a phone that I have from my time in the UK (purchased totally legitimately secondhand, off this forum in fact). Trouble is, O2 customer service won’t do it as I’m not the original owner and don’t know the original mobile phone number that came with the phone, and I can’t get in touch with the bloke I bought it off (fair enough, it was 18 months ago!)

As far as I know, it’s pretty simple for O2 to give me an unlock code from the phone’s IMEI, is that right? Or is there more to it?

Cheers all (and hello from Downunder 8) )

any good corner shop should do it….

Not here in Oz unfortunately! 🙁

yes here in oz!! Where are you, there were plenty in the cities, or you could try one of the online ones that send you the code, what is the phone as a rom flash may do it too

I’m up in Townsville (North Queensland). The two mobile phone ‘surgeries’ in town say they can’t do it as it’s a UK phone. I’m tempted to try and root it myself and then unlock it, but if I can get someone from O2 to do it legitimately for me without the need to root it, that’d be preferable I think?

ah you need the other kind of phone surgery…

have you looked on the internet for how to guide?
Or an app if its an android phone.

A how to guide seems to involve ‘rooting’ the phone first, which appears to be mildly complicated and potentially risky? 😕

read many of them, there tends to be a consensus you can find from all the different ones. some are needlessly complicated. What is the phone? I did my S2 by just downloading the SUinstaller and running it from the recovery.

It’s a Samsung S2, currently locked to O2 (I used it on Giff Gaff).

Righto, the one thing NOT to do (just cos I don’t know what kernel it has, is perform a factory reset, dopesn’t come into it for just unlocking but thought i’d warn you. DO NOT DO ONE not worth the risk – a small number of them have a glitched kernel that rapes its own mind). If installing a custom mod the instructions will tell you to do one, not necessary – there’s a work around.

But for unlocking you don’t need to do that, so don’t worry.

You need SUinstaller for your phone (i9100 or i9100G) – for i9100P use i9100. And the latest Clockwork mod.

Put both those on a microSD card.

Boot to recovery, run .zip from sdcard, find, slect and run CWM, from CWM do the same, and run SU installer. (SU installer won’t run from the stock recovery.

From app store try the free S2 unlockers, didn’t work for me but they’re free so try them first, in the end I payed a small amount for one that worked v quickly.

Feel free to ping me an email, going out now, but back later, I’ve just gone through this and if yours isn’t a G I have the right files too.

Nope, rooting or putting a custom ROM on the phone wont remove a SIM lock. It has to be done by the network and is seperate from the OS of the phone.
I’ve tried similar on a SE Arc,even got the unlocking code direct from O2. It still wouldn’t work. Apparently there are two methods of sim locking a handset, soft and hard. Hard usually means you have to pay someone to do it remotely (assuming it can be unlocked)
Have a look on the XDA forums and you might get some useful info from there.

It has to be done by the network

it really doesn’t. Rooting won’t remove it, but root access is needed to do it.

Perhaps on the Samsung it can be, but I san assure that sim locking on the SE Arc cannot except by the network, even then the code method doesnt always work. You can do it via a test point method, but that costs money.

any good corner shop should do it….

As above – it used to be simple, now it’s not, so many can’t be done easily.