Unlocked old phone today, feeling kind of proud!

[Klutch9]

This summer my wife and I are travelling to Europe, and we wanted a phone while we were there. I bought a local SIM card for each of the two countries we will be visiting. The phone in question is a Moto Droid RAZR Maxx HD. This phone is 'unlocked' internationally by default, but within the US it is locked into Verizon's CDMA network. After about 4 hours of research, downloading programs til I found the right one, and following a tutorial, I rewrote the cell radio firmware in about 2 minutes. I popped in one of my GSM SIMs, set the phone to GSM networks (instead of CDMA), turned roaming on as a test, and it works! I registered onto AT&T's network, and was able to make test calls for free, and check the account balance on the SIM. For those of you who have never done this before, it is certainly doable with some homework!

 

[daves87rs]

Cool!!

 

[Doog]

Any of the Verizon 4LGTE phones are global. Just change the sim card. The iphone 4s , 5,5s and 6 all will work.

 

[Kuato]

That is awesome....care to share any links from your research?

 

[zach1900]

All Verizon LTE phones are unlocked by default.

 

[Donald]

The OP is talking about unlocking the baseband, not a plain unlocking of the phone. I did the same to my Droid 2 and used it on T-Mobile in the USA.

While the Droid 2 will do GSM in Europe, it will not do GSM in the USA unless you unlock the baseband.

 

[Klutch9]

Originally Posted By: Donald
The OP is talking about unlocking the baseband, not a plain unlocking of the phone. I did the same to my Droid 2 and used it on T-Mobile in the USA.

While the Droid 2 will do GSM in Europe, it will not do GSM in the USA unless you unlock the baseband.


This is what I was talking about. I know that all Verizon LTE phone are unlocked for use in Europe, and elsewhere perhaps. But I really did NOT want to fire my phone up for the first time, with a SIM bought over the internet, in another country. So I unlocked the national GSM band in order to check that the phone at least goes into GSM roaming (which it did), and that I could check the credit balance on the SIM itself, and that, too, worked. Also, I was curious, so why not?

but I do feel better knowing that my SIM does work. I'll reload it with some more data before I go and verify that all is well.