So I purchased a G1 from t-mobile when they were reasonably new, and have since was kindly donated a nexus one (best phone ever). But what to do with my old G1? Obvi - turn it into an Android Developer Phone that I can run without a sim card, and test my apps on anything faster than the emulator. Not to mention the value of actual phone, accelerometer and leds. I know G1’s are locked, hence I took the action as a good citizen and called T-Mobile. Turns out if you have the phone for 90 days then they will just give you the Unlock Code. So I naively thought that would allow me to wipe the phone, and run sans sim. Wrong. Turns out that you only get the unlock prompt if you have a foreign sim card. But if I use a bunk sim, I wont have a data connection, and could not get past registration. I ended up with a useless piece of hardware that would do nothing but report the absence of a sim card. Let me share a few other highlights:
So I took a simpler approach. SInce I am still a t-mobile customer with a data plan I just pulled my sim from the Nexus ONe, back into my G1, and registered a new bogus user. After the user is registered I turned on wifi, and usb debug, then restarted. After the restart I turned off the phone to remove the sim. (my first attempt of removing sim without a clean reboot resulted in a no sim card lockout) This way I can still lend the device to a co-worker as a dev phone, without worrying about my info. So if any of you happen to have a legit way to bypass the sim card lockout and enter the htc/t-mobile provided unlock code to permanently eliminate the need for a sim card, please share.