Help Unlock my samsung stratosphere?

[jusanotherhobo]

I use to use a Samsung Stratosphere, but due to my sister convincing my dad I didn't need a smart phone I now have a basic phone. I want to unlock my stratosphere so I can use it through Straight talk. So how do I unlock my Stratosphere, for free? & is it possible that once I unlock it I can use it through straight talk, and if not, if I buy a sim card from straight talk and put it in my stratosphere then will it work? Thanks so much for any help!

 

[acejavelin]

I use to use a Samsung Stratosphere, but due to my sister convincing my dad I didn't need a smart phone I now have a basic phone. I want to unlock my stratosphere so I can use it through Straight talk. So how do I unlock my Stratosphere, for free? & is it possible that once I unlock it I can use it through straight talk, and if not, if I buy a sim card from straight talk and put it in my stratosphere then will it work? Thanks so much for any help!

Possibly... there has been some discussion on unlocking the Stratosphere on RootzWiki in this thread, although I don't think anyone has been successful but it might get you started.

The Strat is a CDMA/LTE phone so the SIM is only used for the LTE portion, getting a SIM from Straight Talk won't work, their SIMs are for GSM phones. No other carrier uses the Strat so there are no other ROM images around for it other than Tweaked ones and there has been no official updates for the phone so the RIL is still locked.

Long story shortened: You probably won't get the Stratosphere to work on Straight Talk, and if you do somehow get it to work, you likely won't get 3G data service, much less 4G.

 

[bperwien]

From what it looks to me, straight talk can use either GSM or CDMA...Talk to verizon, they had a lawsuit a while back about the phones being unlocked and I think they said that verizon has to unlock the phone.

 

[ben7337]

Who is verizon going to unlock this phone for? Either I'm misunderstanding completely or there is a serious lack of understanding on how this phone works.

1) This is not a global phone. It has a sim card slot for LTE only. It cannot work on a GSM carrier and it only supports verizon's frequency for lte.

2) Since you would put it on CDMA straight talk, and since all cdma carriers even prepaid usually limit you to esn numbers that they recognize as their own branded phones, you likely cannot put this phone on straight talk even if it was unlocked for other cdma carriers

3) When verizon unlocks a phone they unlock global phones. They don't unlock cdma only phones nor can they unlock the cdma to work on other carriers, and even if they could they wouldn't do this because even when they unlock global phones, those phones are still blocked from at&t and tmobile.

4) It is possible to flash a cdma phone to a different carrier, but this is your job to hack and do, not the carrier's job. It is not something they want to help with since it would just cost them money to not have a customer.

5) Most importantly, since this is an LTE phone it may require a sim card simply to even activate and use on a network, however I have heard of lte phones on straight talk, though with some difficulty.

Anyway I'm almost 100% positive it would be impossible to put the stratosphere on straight talk cdma and am 100% positive it is impossible to put on their gsm.

Also further searching reveals that in general putting cdma phones onto straight talk does require flashing them over. If you want sprint's network it may be doable but you need a donor phone from what I can tell. If you want verizon's network then you will get kicked off it as all of their phones on straight talk currently have software called air tank on them which apparently straight talk can recognize. That is what i got from this thread linked below anyway. Good luck.

Android Straight Talk CDMA Flash

 

[tyroniuz]

Just a note - I noticed when I made a stratosphere into a wifi phone for my son he started to notice random time discrepancies. As soon as there was more than a small time diff, gmail stopped working along with play store etc etc. I put sytrant on it from the play store and it helped a ton! This allows you to manually (or auto if you like) sync with internet time servers. If you have both phone service and data it gives you a backup time sync. Just thought I would throw that out there in case anyone has a similar issue.