[Android General] sparkyuiop:
I recently bought the Samsung Galaxy S2 i9100 from a pal of mine.

He is a bit of a shady character sometimes but he has always been pretty straight with me so when he told me he was selling his phone for £120 (including the box & manuals) I trusted him that it wasn't stolen or reported lost etc.

However...LOL! Apon inserting a new T-Mobile UK SIM card into it (It was a T-Mobile branded phone) I found it saying Emergency Calls Only!

He says that he got the phone on contract, which I believe and from what I have discovered on the t'internet, T-Mobile are pretty 'trigger happy' at IMEI blocking phones that don't get the bill paid on time.

But not being quite as trusting as I may seem and being the chairman of the self preservation society, I decided to get a CheckMend report.

Sure enough it was not stolen (report uploaded) or reported lost but it was reported as being blocked by one or more networks and was currently being blocked by one or more networks.

I asked my pal about this and he said that one of his dodgy buddies had tried to steal it from him once so he asked at the T-Mobile shop that they block it, which according to him, they did.

He then apparantly caught up with this bloke and massacred his face (I got the whole exaggerated story) and got the phone back and the T-Mobile twonks to 'de-barr' it again.

Now I don't know if any of that's true, it probably is actually but I'm pretty sure the main reason it's locked out is because the bruiser didn't pay his bill.

Anyway that didn't help me any so before congratulating myself on buying a small Android tablet PDA I decided to have a stab at trying to somehow make it function as a phone.

I flashed it with Odin and a non T-Mobile stock ROM, rooted it, stared at the nv_data.bin in Hex Workshop untill I couldn't see straight then had a shot at those app's that apparantly extract the SIM unlock number which failed to work either.

I thought I would add a further £16 to my loss by buying an unlock code in the slim-arse chance that it being locked out of 'one of more networks' meant that it wasn't all of them. Yeah, that was a long shot!

How-bloody-ever... After going through lots of old SIM cards that I have hoarded over the years (verifying first that they worked in another phone - der!) I wasn't having much luck.

Gif-Gaf, No! O2, No! Vodafone, No! Tesco, No! Virgin (Ah-Ha?), No! Lycos (it's gotta, what do they care, no one has even heard of them anyway), No! T-Mobile, Pass! 3UK, No! Orange...

Now I had about 20 Orange SIMs that looked like they had just rolled off the production line and not one of them worked. Likely they expired through never being activated but at the bottom of the baggie with the Orange SIMs in it was an Orange SIM dating back to around 1400 B.C.

I stopped worrying about my loss then as I thought I was soon to be in the money with my new found relic. Reluctantly I got some wire-wool and removed the surface rust (OK now I'm exaggerating) and popped the manky old thing into the nice shiney white S2!

That was the first time I have ever seen the 'Emergency Calls Only' dissapear but I had read somewhere that different networks block in different ways. i.e. some show a signal but won't connect, some won't show any signal but will dial then hang up etc. etc. so I didn't start jumping for joy untill I rang 453 and heard the voice of that patronising bi**h tell me I had £1.10 credit!

Then I rung my landline and... it rang! LOL! Happy Day's! The future is bright, the future is Orange and trust me that aint going to change either! Although I will be looking at my signal meter with some dreaded forboding over the next few days!

Now I have no idea if this will work with a brand new Orange SIM, I assume that it will though. In any case it would appear that as long as your phone is not nicked or reported lost, Orange don't give a damn if you want to connect to their PAYG network and give them cash - and rightly so!

Well done Orange for having some judgement and not blindly barring expensive phones that I got cheap!

Now does anyone want to buy a white S2 for £300? Problem is it is locked to Orange....

P.S I have uploaded a PIC of the email I got from the site I bought the £16 unlock from. They were really quick (out of hours too I assumed) and they give you all the codes including the freeze code and 3 others that I have no idea what they are for.

P.P.S No I don't know what 'summarize' means! I was just pleased dude!