New Member
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4 Messages
AT&T officially unlocked phones - software limitations and update problems
Hi,
I live in Europe and I have purchased three phones that were originally sold by AT&T, both of them officially unlocked.
The first one is a Sonim XP8 and the problem that i have with this one is that I can not use the hotspot feature. From what I understand this feature was restricted by AT&T so that an additional data plan had to be purchased. Sine the phone is no longer locked to AT&T I think the hotspot feature should be unlocked. Also the phone is dual SIM but only one sim works at a time. if you insert two sim cards one of the is disabled automatically when the phone starts.
The second one is a Kyocera Duraforce Pro and i have the same problem with the hotspot as mentioned above. Another problem is the fact that no matter what I do I can not update the software. I have even tried to connect via a VPN from the US.
The third one is a Samsung Galaxy S7 Active but with this one i do not have a hotspot issue. It works perfectly. The problem that i have with this one is that i can not perform software update.
Can anyone provide some info / help? I have tried contacting AT&T, been waiting for a lot of minutes but no one responded.
thank you
Constructive
Former Employee
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32.9K Messages
4 years ago
unlocked phones not on an at&t network will not receive updates , the hotspot on the at&t branded phone is designed to only work on at&t networks
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formerlyknownas
ACE - Sage
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117.4K Messages
4 years ago
Just know that the bootloaders are encrypted and signed, not just locked. So any attempt to get around the existing software, you May wind up with a brick that you can do nothing with.
The hotspot problem is also a known issue and yes it is controlled by AT&T software. Usually you can get around it by not using the built-in hotspot and downloading a third-party application.
After 5 years and more than a dozen AT&T branded Android phones I was very careful that when I sold a phone, I absolutely refused to ship it out of the United States. I even put in every single advertisement that the phone was sold for the US only I would not ship abroad because the phone would never update its software. You'd be surprised how many people either didn't read the ad or insisted it was no big deal and they wanted me to sell them the phone anyway. Nope. I would not do it.
(edited)
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