[Motorola Droid 4] every1nosme:
I'm sure if anyone has any luck with this they will post the results here so I'm not gonna rush out to buy a droid 4 and test this out but I will start keeping my eye out for a used one at a good price again before I gave up out of frustration waiting for this to happen originally.

Either way I appreciate the effort many here put into getting this done and its a shame verizon and motorola killed a great phone by not either unlocking the verizon version or releasing an international GSM version like they did with the droid3/milestone3 model.

It really stings even harder since they haven't released and don't seem interested in releasing a droid 5 and all the other manufacturers that have phones with physical qwertys seem to limit them to lower end models or at most midgrade models hardwarewise that get released with a version of android behind whatever is current at the time with no intention to upgrade it.

This leaves me having to decide between my droid3 with really solid hardware but either stuck on 2.3 or unsupported custom roms that despite some great developers hard work end up lacking certain features or are unreliable in some way or moving to a newer model that may be somewhat more up to date on the software end but falls a little farther behind every day and lacks the solid reliability and overall quality features (I.e. inferior keyboard, lower quality camera) I expect when I pick out a phone.

Maybe verizon will surprise me and update the phone if someone asks but after following that link and reading to the bottom of the page I noticed a disclaimer that I'm sure will be the answer we will get about this phone:

PLEASE NOTE: Carriers typically use different frequencies and air interface technologies to provide wireless network access. Accordingly, a device that works on one carrier’s network may not be technologically compatible with another carrier’s network. “Unlocking” a device refers only to disabling software that would prevent a consumer from attempting to activate a device designed for one carrier’s network on another carrier’s network, even if that network is technologically compatible. In other words, “unlocking” a device will not necessarily make a device interoperable with other networks – a device designed for one network is not made technologically compatible with another network merely by “unlocking” it. Additionally, unlocking a device may enable some functionality of the device but not all (e.g., an unlocked device may support voice services but not data services when activated on a different network).

I'm sure that's what they will claim when it comes down to it which is B.S. since we all know that hardware is not the issue with the droid 4 and that its an intentional software block that is the issue but I doubt they had the droid 4 in mind when they posted this policy.

It seems like the d4 came out very early in the line of 4g phones and not long after that most, if not all, of their LTE phones began coming out unlocked or with just a normal sim lock so this policy just points that out and doesn't require verizon to actually do anything other than offer the sim unlock code for those models that do require it but this is a process that they already had in place and isn't model specific.

The d4 would need a software/modem update that I assume would have to come from motorola and since they didn't sell a gsm version of this phone and no one was ever able to find a similar model we could swap the modem software into like was done with the d3 they would have to rewrite the existing modem just for this phone which they didn't even bother updating to the current version of android when it was still a current model being sold with a tag on the shelf that said "android 4.0" capable implying it would be updated and then didn't bother with it. By now there are probably just not enough users of this phone left for them to worry about pissing people off when they tell us we are s.o.l since it didn't bother them to tell us that when they chose not to update the phone in the first place.

At the time I figured this was a sign a droid5 was on the way and the newer version of android would be one of the selling points but that never happened. Might have been a decision to kill the qwerty line or might have fallen through the cracks with moto selling out to google, idk, but sad thing is they could probably rerelease the d4 with a little more ram, higher res screen and newest version of android and still sell a ton if it were available on every carrier simply by following apples example and using the chipset in the iphone that works for them.

I apologize for the way too long rant over a 4 year old phone model but it amazes me how hard many have worked here trying to remain as motorola users/customers and how little it seems like they want our business. And even so I'd be the first in line for a droid5 as I'm sure many others would also, meanwhile motorola's sales have tanked and they can't figure out why,lol.