[Xperia Arc Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] chrisyjwai:
Hiya xda!

I realize there is no Xperia Pro section people just post here about Pro with a {PRO} stub in the front so I hope it's alright..

So I just bought an Xperia Pro with prior knowledge that it is locked to Fido Canada. But I bought it anyways with the sole purpose of modding/hacking it. I currently have a HTC Desire Z that I'm using that was locked to Bell Canada. I debranded it, unlocked it, rooted and flashed CWM installed CM7 on it.

So if the next section is tl;dr, skip to the where the asterisks are I guess.

---------------------------------------

So maybe I should give a little background about myself since this is like my first proper post. My first phone was a was a robust Siemens but it was black and white and I dropped it in the sea so let's just skip that. Then came my second phone which kicked off my modding life/career. It was a Motorola E398 (nostalgia.. I know right?). It was an awesome phone in which the speakers were so kickass that it's primary vibrator was the low bassy frequencies of the speaker. Anyways, it was awesome but being the son of an engineer and an avid DIY kind of guy I knew that I could make it more awesome.

It was released in 2004 but when my mom handed it down to me in 2005 I started my research and became active in the modding community. Basically I was trying to make this "dumb" phone that I had as "smart" as possible in the era when O2 just released the xda for which this community is now named after. (I developed this personality along the lines of "poverty is the mother of ingenuity" kind of thing. Not that my family was poor, but my parents deprived me of material when I was surrounded with "friends"/a**holes/classmates who swam in it like Scrooge Mcduck. I am so grateful now because I can do so much more than them at this stage now).

Since then my motto has been "The software doesn't matter because that can always change." (Of course it's all that matters but that's what I tell people who tell me not to buy HTC but Sony because it comes bundled with some panorama app..)

Then I got two Asus Windows Mobile hand-me-downs from my dad and I started to spend a lot of time here on xda devs learning the ropes and what not. Soon after my dad got tired of me "physically/hardware-ally" messing up the phones (I had to replace the resistive touch screen of my P535 twice and till this day it still has a cracked glass layer because I didn't replace it the third time).

But then I started college and I had the freedom to move up (starting from small beginnings). And that was when I got my second hand Bell Canada branded Desire Z. And that brings me to this day with a Fido locked Xperia Pro sitting next to me with the film still on it (It's second hand, but new, so probably an unwanted gift or something so I got it for a deal :D)

I realize that I've only mentioned some 4 or 5 phones here (there were some 2 or 3 filler phones that were too "dumb" to mod, I guess there was also my gramps I9000i which I fitted CM7 onto) and so my phone resume isn't that great but I guess I've to be proud with what I have under my belt so far. I'm 19 in 2012 so I've been modding some 8 years since I was 11.

So although I have spent a a lot time lurking the web and modding/hacking phones, notice that I never use the word "development" because to be honest I haven't done any. Up to this point I can follow/understand relatively complex instructions, including, but not limited to, how to debug over ADB and etc. But I'm still an undergraduate majoring in Mathematics B.S Computational Mathematics Option, all the while diligently going through my introductory C++ course.

I hope I haven't broken any "off-topic" rules in this self introductory section of mine.

*******************************

So as you can see I'm not professional or anything, so the first question I'd like to ask is why there seems to be so little third party community support for this phone.. It has been released for over a year now and the search bar still seems to be evading this one in favor for all the other 2011 Xperias. There isn't even an official section for this thing here nor is there official support for it from the CM community (I'm not asking for ETAs).

So getting down to the more technical stuff. I didn't spend a dime transforming my Bell Desire Z from the cave-man-phone that it was into this Terminator it is today. I found methods to sim unlock, debrand, root and everything all just using a mini USB cable connected to the computer. I assumed the same when I got the Pro but I guess I was mistaken? It seems that the only way to sim unlock it now is to use a code or SETools2.

So the main thing is, I know that SETools2 does a multi-unlock (network, bootloader and fastboot) but what if I did them all separately? What if I bought one of those standalone sim unlock codes and then followed instructions here to unlock the bootloader afterwards. Would that work permanently? Or are the codes just some non-permanent "patches".

The simlock seems to be the biggest obstacle right now. I've read all the stuff thereafter to get to my goal, CM9 (the bootloader unlocking, rooting and firmware flashing seems to be composed of instructions that I can follow)

But there also seem to be some new thingymabobs flying around. Like, there seems to be an optimum "baseband" version to work with but heck I don't know how it fits into the context of Pro..

Any help would be appreciated. I appreciate it even if you've merely skimmed my super long rant post :)

Thank You in advance.

Cheers!