The other week we mentioned the Microsoft approved WIndows Phone unlock tool. The Chevron team have been busy unlocking hundreds of devices for people, but they bogged down with errors and people not being able to unlock their phones. They had to suspend new orders last week and today they are now taking orders again. Their website has a little blog post keeping us updated too.
ChevronWP7 Labs Nov 14 update
First of all, we apologize if we didn’t reply to every comment, email or Twitter message. We’re committed to ensuring the service works for everyone. Whilst a majority of users were able to unlock successfully, we’ve been working very hard to resolve some outstanding issues for some people.
We disabled token purchasing last week to investigate some problems in the unlocking process. We had anticipated to re-enable purchasing sooner but one issue has turned out to be quite tricky.
Currently, we’re aware of an issue in which some phones do not properly communicate with the PC. This also means the unlocking process cannot be initiated. This not only affects ChevronWP7 Labs, but the official Microsoft Developer Unlock tool too.
We helped a number of users through a dozen known solutions and alternatives, all of which had no effect. Whilst some people had some success hard resetting their phone, this was neither guaranteed nor something we want to recommend.
We are currently in contact with Microsoft to explore other solutions, however this will probably take some time. Since this is an issue outside of our control, we will refund any users suffering from this problem who do not wish to wait. We ask that you first go through our support process to determine if you’re affected or not.
Needless to say, a lot of people are still waiting to use ChevronWP7 Labs. We know not being able to purchase a token has been frustrating, but please understand it was in good faith.
After implementing a number of server and client fixes today, we’re glad to announce token purchasing has now been re-enabled.
We anticipate a small number of new users will too run into the issue described above we hope they are patient while we continue our investigation.
I am yet to unlock my Dell, but I would be interested to hear if any of you have managed to get your phone unlocked, if so let us know how it went in the comments.
SOurce – ChevronWP7
I pounced on this almost as soon as the original announcement went live. No difficulty getting my token, had to download the support tool and then after that when I fire up the unlock app I was in a queue of 35 – which moved quite slowly (very slowly) initially. But it unlocked nicely and I’ve been playing with my own app on the phone (and Omnia 7) since.
So… I beat the rush in the first instance and as a consequence things went quite smoothly – it was getting progressively worse through the day after I’d done my unlock.
Tahnks for sharing your experience! I’m hoping to get round to it this wekend. Then we will have some homebrew apps featured on the site.
Tahnks for sharing your experience! I’m hoping to get round to it this wekend. Then we will have some homebrew apps featured on the site.
I pounced on this almost as soon as the original announcement went live. No difficulty getting my token, had to download the support tool and then after that when I fire up the unlock app I was in a queue of 35 – which moved quite slowly (very slowly) initially. But it unlocked nicely and I’ve been playing with my own app on the phone (and Omnia 7) since.
So… I beat the rush in the first instance and as a consequence things went quite smoothly – it was getting progressively worse through the day after I’d done my unlock.