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when paige was here in march, i was in sweden and norway. i needed a phone there, and when i was setting up international calling on our account, i noticed that our phones’ GSM frequencies weren’t available in east africa. paige’s phone didn’t work here or in tanzania, so that in fact turned out to be true.

when we moved here, it didn’t occur to me to try out our phones, so it wasn’t until after paige had bought a local phone that i decided to turn on my phone to give it a try. actually, i think i was just turning it on to check somebody’s contact info that i had stored and saw that i had full bars of coverage and thought to try making a call. pressed the speed dial key for mom’s studio, and sure enough the phone rang. cool. mom not in today, driving around lake superior.

i knew the phone was locked to cingular but i decided to try a local sim card in it just in case… no go. i tried placing a call and got the “phone restricted” message on the screen. so now it was time to figure out how to unlock the phone. the only reason i knew that cell phones are locked in the first place was because on eBay the auctions make a big deal out of a phone being unlocked. A+++++!!!!! Motorola Razr **UNLOCKED** (not Anna Kournikova, Manolo Blahnik, ipod) anyway, that kind of thing. so after what should have been about a minute and a half of google time but was actually 45 minutes internet café time, i found a site where you enter your phone’s 15-digit IMEI# and it spits out a code to type in that removes all its restrictions.

http://unlock.nokiafree.org
the site gives you seven lines of codes. apparently you’re best off using the 7^th one. i used the first one the first time but i could only receive calls and could neither send nor receive texts. then used the 7^th and all was good.
press the # key
press the * key three times to get p
press the * key four times for w
press the * key two times for +
then you enter the code they give you followed by + and the number of the line of code you used (in our case number 7)
press the # key
paige’s unlock code looked like this #pw+106514321302201+7#
press send.

so now we’re both using our phones from home and we’ll keep the extra phone to give to friends who come to visit. (so come visit) 101phil 101ht 101africa