h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi, any experts out there?

I have been given a mobile by a friend, which is better than my current one (the phone, not the friend! )

It's a Nokia (of some description), about a year old, and appears to be locked so as to only accept O2 SIM cards.

I have an Orange SIM card which I'm quite happy with (plus I'm trying not to spend any more money...)

Is it legal to unlock a locked phone and if so, how do I go about doing it?

Thanks

rt

Well rooftiler, it seems to be legal and in some cases free!

Why not go to http://www.trycktill.com/eng/

Although it seems there may be a price to pay - nasty junk texts...



rt

You will need to get an appropriate cable to attach your phone to your computer, and then the appropriate software to send the unlocking commands to your phone. Details vary depending on which phone it is. If you post the model I may be able to help further.

A phone-to-PC cable is pretty useful to get anyway as you can do things like backup your phone book and upload picture messages.

Thanks milchflasche.

It's a Nokia 3310.

However the site above managed to generate the unlock code so I'm able to use my Orange card now.

Thanks for the tips. When I'm a bit more flush I may look into the phone-to-PC link although our PC's a bit old too!

rt

Oh, same as mine!

One of the things I did with my 3310 is upgrade the phone software to the latest version. Amongst other things, it gives you a picture editor so you can draw picture messages .. and probably the most useful thing of all, a keypad timeout so if you do accidently sit on your phone and unlock the keys, it'll lock again in a few seconds. Thus preventing accidental calls to the emergency services and stuff.

Sounds like a good idea! I heard about that (I think on the same site as listed above) but the code they gave to check the current version of the software didn't work on mine. I think it was along the lines of *#0000#

(With a possibly different number of 0's.)

Any ideas?

rt

I did find out my version number (the code works *with* a SIM whereas the code to find your IMEI works *without* a SIM) - I'm not up-to-date but I will wait for a bit before getting cable, software etc for an update.

Unless anyone's figured out a way to remotely update your software level

rt