I had an old Samsung X426 flip phone lying around which a friend needed as a “Pay As you Go” spare phone for his someone. The Cingular store gave us an option and told us, “… if you have an unlocked phone all you need is to buy refill minutes…”.
\nNice, the challenge was to get it unlocked. A quick search on Craigslist gave me a “will come to the nearest Walmart parking lot and unlock in 5 minutes for $10” option — The guy said, he would do a Samsung x426 without using any software or a device. That rang a bell.
\nHere are the steps I followed (collated from multiple sources, courtesy Google):
\n1. Ripped the battery and Inserted a SIM card from another network provider than the one who locked the phone
\n2. On power up the phone reported “Wrong Card”. Keyed *#9998*3323# and then selected “Exit”
\n3. Selected Menu #7 (“Jump to Fail”) which caused a reboot of the phone.
\n4. On reboot entered *0141# and selected the call button. “Personalization” appears on the screen.
\n5. The splash screen of the new SIM provider shows up.
\n6. Anyway, power cycled the phone and called my landline. The phone was now unlocked.
\nEnough money saved to cover a week’s supply of small cappuccino from the corner coffee shop. Total time spent 20 minutes!
\nGood use of technology = $10 = free coffee for a week \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had an old Samsung X426 flip phone lying around which a friend needed as a “Pay As you Go” spare phone for his someone. The Cingular store gave us an option and told us, “… if you have an unlocked phone all you need is to buy refill minutes…”. Nice, the challenge was to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.khaitan.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}