Yea maybe, I was hoping someone else had this model phone and knew if any of the online unlocking services that claim to be able to do it, were actually genuine or not
Don't fancy giving out any money for a fake unlocker
I was able to Bootloader and Sim Unlock Xperia Ray ST18a(i) but it cost me $10 to do it. The Carrier could not do it. I used FastGSM. I don't know exactly HOW this process works but it does work. It involved connecting Test points which I believe temporarily open a way to insert a SIM Unlock certificate which may not be genuine due to the fact that when your carrier buys the phone from Sony or another manufacturer, they are factory locked in other words, the network lock is inserted into a secure partition. I believe the test points open up this secure partition for inserting another Certificate through the s1tool. FastGSM uses a program which when you log in, checks to see if you have credits, and once that stage passes, it downloads and inserts this certificate into the secure partition. It also unlocks the bootloader in this process allowing you to get Fastboot mode. This is what I believe, not sure if it is actually the case. However, I wasn't just merely satisfied that my Bootloader and SIM are both Unlocked. I prefer a technical explanation of what this process does and HOW it works. Ofcourse, the unlocking source are not going to tell me how they did it. But I believe they got their hands on the certificate that gets inserted once the EEPROM is temporarily unsecured using test points. I firmly believe SIM Unlocking should be free and should be available to anyone who wants to go at it. I believe the Warranty and other excuses they give such as warnings about security etc are redundant and pointless. If you look around, just the process of Rooting is daunting enough for most 95 percent of the population, so I don't think people would go around unlocking their phones even if the information was made available. Most people wouldn't even know about it.
Next time, purchase a phone that can be easily unlocked, Do some research. Although the $10 I spent unlocking is not a big deal, I personally do not ever want to pay a single dime to network unlock a device that I already own. Here we have to pay $50 to the carrier to unlock it. I would rather help people by giving them information on how to do it for free. Then they can go void their warranty if they wish. People who care about warranties are not going to bother with any of this, which begs the question, why are SIM Unlocks such a tightly guarded secret, and what can we as a community do to thwart the efforts of these Carriers to keep us locked in such a way that the device we own is deemed useless if its not on their Air.
