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imei-check screwed me over. No unlock on 8525. Help!

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Posted by: SrchingForSignl

I apologize to those who read xda-developers as well as HoFo; this is a cross post from there. I'm kind of desperate to get my 8525 working in Australia but I'm starting to sense a defective radio...

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Since I had less than a day to prepare my 8525 before leaving for Australia, I figured I'd pay www.imei-check.co.uk for their unlocking service so I could use My Precious down under. I read through the unlock instructions on this site, but couldn't verify a single person who'd used them with an 8525 and was not willing/able to be the guinea pig.

After arriving in Oz and popping in a SIM from Telestial, I could not find a network at all. Yes, Network selection was set to Automatic. When I clicked 'Find Network' it just ground away on 'Searching...' for many minutes (sometimes almost an hour) before reporting 'No Network.'

So I tried manually selecting a Network but everything listed is *outside* of Australia. Frustrating.

So then I went to the following stores and tried SIMs from all three:
- Vodafone
- Telstra
- Optus

None of the salespeople's SIMs could find a signal.

So yesterday I sent an Email to imei-check.co.uk complaining that the unlock did not work and I get this Email back (verbatim):

"Hello,

you are not correct. After unlocking you can use ANY sim card. NO ROM flashing is required. What is the error message you get when you try a different SIM card? For us it just sounds like YOU set the phone for FIXED network selection and when you try different SIM card now it can not find your fixed network. So please correct this wrong setting from you in your phone settings:

Start->Settings->Phone->Networks, select Automatic, press "OK" and wait 1 minute."

Does anybody else find that seriously offensive? Are their average customers really that stupid?

FWIW, I even contacted Telestial and then they informed me that their SIM (to connect with the 'JUST' network, if anyone's ever heard of that) was incompatible with my phone. Incompatible with a quad-band GSM HTC phone? Come on...

I knew I was going to be bleeding edge, but I really feel like nobody's interested in helping with this stupid phone...


Posted by: GregGebhardt

Might be a phone problem. Even if the phone is locked it should tell you so with someone eles's SIM card in it. Is it possible that the phone is defective.


Posted by: gregsmith59

There is no JUST network in Australia. Sounds like an MVNO, since the GSM providers are Optus, Telstra and Vodafone. Hutchinson has W-CDMA only.


Are you sure your phone is not set to use only certain bands, which would preclude it from finding 900/1800?


Someone had a problem on a BlackJack in Australia recently:

http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1058899

Seems like Cingular might not be allowed to roam on 3G there, although they were able to get GSM roaming to work in the end.

Not that the above seems directly related to your problem, but did you try putting your Cingular SIM in there to see if the phone could at least roam there? (Seems like you are on your own to debug the situation.) To save some money you might just want to borrow a phone from a local - since most people have GSM in Australia there are tons of old phones stuffed in drawers. Buying a prepaid phone is another option, but cell phones are not so cheap down there as here at home.


Posted by: SrchingForSignl

Quote:
Originally Posted by gregsmith59
There is no JUST network in Australia. Sounds like an MVNO, since the GSM providers are Optus, Telstra and Vodafone. Hutchinson has W-CDMA only.


Are you sure your phone is not set to use only certain bands, which would preclude it from finding 900/1800?


Someone had a problem on a BlackJack in Australia recently:

http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1058899

Seems like Cingular might not be allowed to roam on 3G there, although they were able to get GSM roaming to work in the end.

Not that the above seems directly related to your problem, but did you try putting your Cingular SIM in there to see if the phone could at least roam there? (Seems like you are on your own to debug the situation.) To save some money you might just want to borrow a phone from a local - since most people have GSM in Australia there are tons of old phones stuffed in drawers. Buying a prepaid phone is another option, but cell phones are not so cheap down there as here at home.


Greg,
Thanks for taking a stab at my problem. Yes, I've tried to roam with the Cingular SIM. One of the interesting things is that the results I get are the same with ALL SIMs I've tried (up to four, now.) This is why I concluded that it was an unlock problem.

Yeah, I could get a local phone but I'm determined to make this work. I'm going to be travelling around the world even more over the next year and would like to have data come directly down to it. And get calls, of course (that thing phones are supposed to do.)

I haven't discovered the setting in WM5 where you can point the phone radio to a particular frequency. Where would this be?

Thanks,
/Peter




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