Unlocking The Nokia Asha 302
Grey To White
Unlocking the Nokia Asha
Firstly, my apologies for my absence on both here, forums and the www in general recently, family issues, work and life in general have been leaving me very little time lately, but hopefully things will be getting back to what I call normal fairly soon now
That said this piece is simply a little follow up on the one I did on the Nokia Asha loaned to me by Richard Yates a few weeks ago. Richard (@richardcyates on Twitter) had a plan to start a ‘World Tour’ with the little Asha 302, the issue with this was that the phone was carrier locked to Three UK and obviously using the phone with a sim card from places like America, Australia or Asia (well anywhere in the world other than the UK, not just places beginning with ‘A’) would at the very least be very expensive. As a result, Richard decided to pay to unlock the phone and as I had it at the time , he emailed me the unlock code so I could unlock it before it was dispatched to the next ‘victim’ Andy Hagon ( on Twitter) this was the beginning of a saga that people who follow myself and the other guys on Twitter may have seen.
Unlock instructions from 3
Steps to unlock the phone:
1.Have your unlock code handy.
2.Insert a 3 SIM card in the phone and switch the power on.
3.Enter the # character.
4.Enter the P character using the QWERTY keypad.
5.Enter the W character using the QWERTY keypad.
6.Enter the + character.
7.Now type the unlock code.
8.Enter the + character.
9.Press the number 1.
10.Enter the # character.
11.If the code was correct, the phone will display "SIM Restriction off".
12.Handset will then reboot and return to standby screen, unlocked from the 3 network.
Off Three Using Vodafone
Phone pics
If you need help, use Twitter
To cut a VERY long story short, after trying and failing to unlock the phone twice with the supplied code and Richard authorising me on the account with Three UK I spoke to their help line (somewhere in the far east by the sound of it ) who talked me through the instructions to unlock the phone, which I had already tried, which failed again and after a couple more irate calls, failure to return calls or emails Richard and I found a solution. If at first you don’t succeed, try Twitter. I have found with other issues that social media tends to get quicker and more useful help than any other method (not that two months to unlock a phone can be considered quick by any stretch of the imagination !!)
Anyway the final result was that after being contacted by @ThreeUKSupport on twitter it was finally decided to return the phone to them and have it unlocked and as this proved both extremely long winded and apparently failed, Three UK , this week sent a replacement phone, white as apposed to the original dark grey , which everyone involved seems to think is an improvement ! A very helpful and patient girl called Lauren who works on the @ThreeUKSupport Twitter account managed to get an unlock code for the new phone, which worked first time !! So now the world tour can continue and I shall be returning the new phone to Richard in the next couple of days.
Phone & Box
Just so this piece wasn’t completely boring, I took a few photos of the new Asha just to break up my babbling
Thanks for reading.
Stephen Quin
17/02/2013