I went to the misnamed “SuperMall” in Auburn, WA last night with my girlfriend to buy a gift for her friend and some supplies for us.
Of course, the night before, my girlfriend and I were looking at T-Mobile’s plans and the Nokia 6101 online. She needed a flip phone (as much as I personally hate their form factor) because she is somewhat hard on them and needed to better protect the keypad.
So as we’re walking by a store, one of the sales reps at a T-Mobile kiosk asks us “What service provider are you with?”. Taken in by my hatred towards Cingular, I tell him, “I’m with Cingular, I hate them, and if you’ll pay me to break my contract, I’ll switch”.
Well, obviously he didn’t pay to break my contract. But I wanted to buy my girlfriend the Nokia 6101 for her birthday anyway, but the retail price was about $150-$200 online. We looked up her account and since she was elegible for a phone upgrade, I paid for the phone upgrade (about $60 plus a $35 rebate) and signed myself up for T-Mobile on a “Family Plan”.
T-Mobile is awesome. I told them my Cingular contract expires in January, but I didn’t need/want a new phone. The guy said he can’t activate new service without a new phone, so I ended up getting a POS Samsung SGH-C225 and a T-Mobile SIM Card for free. He also set it up for a “Delayed Activation” until January 17th, 2006. So, my girlfriend gets a cheap phone upgrade, and we don’t switch to the Family Plan until January! Sweet!
Now, to unlock the phones …
The Nokia 6101 I unlocked on the 2nd try (Phew!). I had to use the following settings at unlock.nokiafree.org: USA: T-Mobile, Original, ASIC-2, then the 7th code.
The Samsung SGH-C225 was just plain confusing. A few codes I found only did a “Temporary SIM Unlock”, which only allowed 911 calls. After deep deep google searching, I found this website and this forum posting (thank you whoever discovered this):
http://www.mobiledia.com/forum/topic33670.html
You can try this, its part of an email I made for someone that neede assistance unlocking a C225. Which is the newer version of that phone. It worked on his model but I cannot guarentee it will work on yours. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, I take no responsibility for you damaging your phone.
Instructions
Unlock Codes
Code 1: *2767*688 then your IMEI and then press #
For example *2767*688352708000828246# (Everything before the / for C225)
Code 2: *0141#
Code 3: 00000000 (8 zero’s)Entering the Codes
1. Switch your phone off. Remove the original SIM card2. Insert another SIM card from an alternative network. Power up your
phone. You should now see the “Wrong Card” message.3. Type Code 1 into your phone, if this is entered correctly your
phone screen should now turn black and reboot itself. (C225 doesn’t go
black but does reboot)4. After the phone reboots the SIM card will be recognized and your
SIM will work. Be patient while your phone reboots and DO NOT press
any keys. At this point the phone is “Temporarily” unlocked.5. Now at your idle screen type in Code 2 and hit the call button.
This should give you a message saying the phone is “Personalized”.6. Power off the phone and insert the original SIM, then power up.
7. At the SIM code prompt, it will ask you to enter a password. At
this stage enter Code 3.8. After entering hit “OK” and your phone should complete initialization.
Your phone is now Permanently unlocked.
Note: These instructions assume the default password of 8 zero’s.
Wow. It worked. I now have a backup phone while I send my Nokia 6230b in for a firmware upgrade.
Speaking of which, the Nokia 6101 came with the HS-23 stereo headset adapter, which I promptly swiped from my girlfriend to never give back. It turned my 6230 into a fully functional, high-quality mp3 player!! Eric & I will post a blog later about modifing this cable to support a 3.5mm line-out jack.
If your GF is tough on the single handset (non-clam shell) phones, I can guarantee that she’ll break the clam shell in a few months.
I’ve repaired my GF Verzion Samsung phone multiple times… so it isn’t too difficult, just a pain.
Well, she isn’t *that* tough on the phone. In her case, having the keypad and screen exposed in her pocket/table/whatever prematurely wears out the keypad, etc. Hey, at least I convinced her to get another Nokia! It is actually not a bad phone… just three major grips with it:
* It uses a smaller, incompatible charger connector (stupid clam-shel phones, anyway) than other nokia’s without buying an adapter.
* The CPU is too slow — It didn’t play the Benny Benassi Satisfaction video I transferred via infrared from my phone well at all — kept skipping and choppy video. Browsing the menus has a noticable lag (i.e. When turning off Keypad lock, if you actually wait until it says “Now press *” before pressing *, it has already timed out and won’t unlock.
* IT ONLY HAS 3.5MB TOTAL SHARED MEMORY! No expansion! Yet, it plays mp3’s, has a camera, records video & conversations, supports Series 40 Themes, etc. Plus it has all that t-mobile junk you can’t delete (due to DRM) taking up a good chunk of the space!
I just sent my 6230 in for a firmware upgrade today — should have it back Thursday or Friday. I’m using that POS Samsung phone right now. I CANNOT STAND IT! I’m about ready to throw it out onto the freeway!
* I can’t seem to get it to vibrate when I receive a text message
* Sure, it has T-9 Text entry, but it doesn’t underline the part of the word i’m typing, uses ‘0’ to select the next match, and ‘#’ for a space.
* Everytime I hit clear (backspace) or next (for compund words), the phone beeps. Can’t figure out how to disable this.
* The new message indicator is constanly flashing because I have messages on the SIM card that can’t be marked as “read”. Even though I went thru and read them all, it still thinks they’re unread.
* It doesn’t have any word wrapping in the editor screen
* The option to move my messages to the SIM card is greyed out
* It doesn’t save my sent messages automatically
* All the ring-tones suck — I’d have to buy a normal “ringer” tone if I wanted it to sound like a phone.
* Turning ON the keypad lock is done by holding ‘*’. Turning it OFF is done like the nokia’s (Menu+’*’). Very inconsistent.
As of today, Jan 17, 2006, I’m officially on T-Mobile. Needless to say, I am nothing but impressed with T-Mobile so far. I called customer service (very friendly people, I might add) to get my number ported from Cingular — after giving out some necessary information, they went to work for me. During the porting process, I had two phones with the same number… SMS and Incoming calls were directed to my Cingular SIM card while the T-Mobile SIM card could place outgoing calls. Within 4 hours, my Cingular SIM card deactivated itself (and I mean deactivated to the point where the phone won’t even find Cingular’s network anymore!). Everything works great. Painless!
I can’t believe how fast T-Mobile delivers SMS. It was less than 1 second from the time I submitted a message to T-Mobile’s website to when my phone started receiving the message OTA (I can tell cause my phone interferes with nearby devices like my monitor or stereo). Total time from submit to delivery was roughly 2-3 seconds. Cingular was always on the order of 10+ seconds, sometimes 12 hours.
Ahh I could go on forever how happy I am to finally have escaped from Cingular. The thing that makes me happy is that when I try logging into Cingular’s website, I now get this error message:
“L108: Online account management is no longer available for this cancelled account. If you feel you have reached this message in error, call Customer Care at 1-800-331-0500.”
Happy happy joy joy!