A few months ago I told you my story about buying a reconditioned phone and generally saving a bit of cash in the process. It pinged back in my head following our earlier eBay sales story because there’s a number of places selling really cheap iPhones which are locked.
I linked to this eBay listing of an iPhone 7 for the crazy-cheap price of £149.99. Trouble is, it’s locked to one network.
Now, that’s no problem if you intend to use it on that network, but to get a deal like this when you want to use it on a different network? Well, you’re going to have problems.
Unlock it! Well yes, that’s the obvious choice. You can go ahead and release the lock which keeps it stuck to the network in question, but where to go? Who to trust?
Following my earlier story, a mate did exactly the same trick – buying a used phone and popping his own SIM card in. He was happy because his SIM-only contract meant that he was paying a much smaller amount per month, but he’d forgotten to check whether the phone he’d bought was locked, which is where I came in. In this instance, we used www.iphoneapprovedunlock.com because of the positive reviews on Trustpilot. The process took less than 24 hours and it was just a matter of selecting the model, the network (which shows as the “carrier” on their site) and then we just put the IMEI.
What’s also good is the fact that, in addition to iPhone Unlocking services, they also offer iCloud Unlocks too. This will remove the device from its previous iCloud account so that you can use the device normally. Also, if you’ve bought a phone and you don’t know which network it’s actually locked to (perhaps you found it in a drawer) then they offer a network check service to instantly find out which network your phone is locked to via that IMEI number.
There’s full order tracking and great support too.
So, even if you do buy yourself an iPhone from eBay which is locked, it’s now really easy to unlock it and get it going one whatever network you choose, giving you the freedom to shop around for the cheapest SIM-only deal and save yourself a stack of money in the process.