[Samsung Galaxy S8+ Questions & Answers] New1Phone:
I swore-off androids (ADHD makes smartphones a very bad distraction for some, especially me) but my friend got a "buy one, get one" deal on the S8+ and, after putting a small edge-crack in the first one, just put it aside - she ended up giving it to me.

With her pins I removed the samsung/google accounts and did a hard-reset, then updated the system- my understanding was that, after doing this, that the phone would be 'open' for switching providers, so expect this is a different level of 'lock' (after hard-resetting, there was an App called 'device unlock', I had to connect to my wifi to get an answer and it said 'no', to contact customer service)

Am unsure if she can get them to unlock it, but even that is a major PITA (we don't see each other often nor do we live nearby), and I half-expect they're going to say 'no' to her anyways if she's trying to get them to let a 3rd party use it on a different carrier. So, I want/may-have-to crack it to get around this and while I'm guessing that a custom ROM will bypass this, I've read enough about there being something on the chip that'll be irrevocably 'tripped' when rooting the phone before flashing ROM's, and that once tripped it can't be undone and causes issues....so am wary!

There's also the idea of just flashing the regular G955U1 firmware but even w/ that I'm unsure if it'll 'trip' whatever the chip's protection from rooting is, I'd really like to get my service (Tracfone) onto it before doing more aggressive 'minimalization' of the system as I'd like to mess-around w/ a new android OS for a bit just to check it out (last time I used android, towelroot was the premiere go-to...that should give an idea how long it's been!)

Any/all ideas or tips or just keywords to get me pointed in the right direction would be incredibly appreciated, have spent many hours this week trying to get this thing working w/ my service, am awaiting my 2nd SIM card (my old phone, via Tracfone, was using verizon towers- so if I want to keep my #, I have to use the Verizon SIM they've mailed me that should be here any day) and, after that re-set, I'm expecting that even the new SIM will not be enough to get it working properly :/

(Something I think is important to point out, though it could be a fluke- during one of my tech-support sessions w/ the people at my carrier(Tracfone), the first one actually, we ended the call *thinking* it was fixed - the tech had finished on his end, asked me to make a call w/ the S8+, I called my landline and sure enough my phone# was calling my landline (via the S8+), however the tech said there were still issues and that he'd work on them, to call back in 24hrs. After hanging-up, I started testing and the first thing I did was to *call* my cell# from the landline and, sure enough, the old phone started ringing (the old phone is CDMA so it wasn't like I'd pulled its SIM), am unsure if I should take this to mean that it just let me dial-out as a fluke (I hadn't hard-reset the handset yet) or if it went wrong another way, but I *was* able to make a single outgoing call from the S8+ with my # so am getting the impression the lock isn't *that* unbeatable!)