Mexico Medical Student |

Before we moved to GDL, I had to drop my friend T-Mobile to get Cingular so we could get the North American plan to get “normal” (ie, not $1.49/min international roaming) minutes down here for both of us to use to keep in touch with friends, family, businesses, etc. I bought a nice Nokia 6230 phone. Unfortunately, it still isn’t supported by iSync on Mac, but I digress… The problem is that every phone company in the US demands you use its chip and only their chip. By “chip” I’m speaking of GSM, which is what 90% of the world uses. I know Sprint, Verizon and Nextel (which uses some odd hybrid) still use CDMA, so I can’t speak to that.

Anyway, a month ago I waited in line forever to get a chip for Telcel so I can use my awesome but dormant Motorola V600 as a local “just me” phone. Friends assured me this would be no problem, but the phone complained, “Enter code:” upon sticking the chip in because it knew it didn’t have a T-Mobile SIM. That “code” is a manufacturer code that will never be given by Motorola, and obviously less so from T-mobile. It’s some keyed number from your hardware ID string to prevent unauthorized service. The same thing happened when I tried our Cingular phone, just to test. That sucks, because there is NO technological reason why they won’t work.

I refused to pay $50+ bucks for a crappy, practically disposable phone when I had a perfectly good hot-rodded phone w/Bluetooth and the works just sitting in a drawer. Such began the month-long campaign to flash and unlock my phone.

After wading the deep underbelly of warez sites, eDonkey2000, and far more pornography ads than I care to have seen (they come almost guaranteed, like it or not, when searching for “black market” software), I have succeeded. Long story short, after MANY MANY failures for drivers, bad flash software, software in French, Portuguese and some other unknown language (God only knows what viral infestation was unleashed on my PC laptop thorough this process, but I re-formatted the drive for other reasons anyway), I finally got it unlocked. Not only did I get it unlocked, but I have it working at a software revision that is a LOT newer with lots more options in the menus than when I first bought it. I can take this thing to Singapore and have local service in minutes, this phone is so global-ready.

Here’s a picture of the process.

Just had to share…

P.S. for those who have no idea what the subject means, it reads (in Leet): “phear (fear) my eleet (elite) haxor (hacker) skillz (skills)”