While in Australia earlier this month we bought a Nokia 1100 cell phone from Telstra. It was only a hundred dollars, included prepaid minutes, and was very helpful to change dinner reservations and to order pizza at 2am. The only downside of this GSM phone was that Telstra had locked it so that SIM cards from other companies wouldn’t work. Telstra did provide a ’service’ to unlock my phone for $50AUS within the first 6 months, or $25AUS afterwards. That sounded fair, but as usual what you can pay for in the real world, you can get on the web for free.

trycktill is a swedish website that calculates the unlock code for your cell phone. The site also has english and danish translations available. To get to the unlocking page, and avoid being redirected to fbi.gov, first click on the Var det nagon som sa gratis? link, and then change to your preferred language.

After entering my phone’s information I entered the first code. It failed. The directions say the second most likely code is the seventh code. That one worked and my phone is now free to use any SIM card in any country. I’m looking forward to using it in upcoming trips to France and Denmark.

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