Old Nokia Phone Unlock - Orange To EE

[Ray_M]

Hi,

Am wondering if someone can point me in the right direction...

My elderly mum struggles with touch screens, years ago she was on Orange Pay & Go and still has an old Nokia C2-01 which had a broken screen, I replaced the screen for her thinking she would be able to stick an EE Pay & Go sim card in and then use the phone again... but this isn't the case as it comes up saying phone restricted.

I have been onto the EE site and tried using their unlock service but got 2 different errors,

First attempt:   Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

Second attempt:   Sorry, something went wrong on our end. Please enter your IMEI again or come back later

Is the system down or can these old phones no longer be unlocked?

[Ali_A · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ray_M 

Welcome to the EE Community

I am very sorry to hear you are experiencing problems while unlocking your phone online. 
 

This would need to be raised with our Customer Service team to manually request an unlock code from the manufacturer if possible. 
Please call us on 150 from an EE phone or 0800 956 6000 from any other phone, and the team will be happy to help.
 

Ali 

 

[Chris_B]

@Ray_M  You might be better off just purchasing a new phone it doesn’t have to a touchscreen device but at least it’ll pick up 4G which this C1 doesn’t,  and with 3G being switched off now it’ll only pick up 2G.   From Argos you can get a Nokia 110 or a TCL 4021 with both support 4G and a not touch screen devices. There are others also. 

[Ray_M]

Thanks to both for your replies,

She also doesn't like threaded text messages which also narrows down the choices available,

I got her a Nokia 105 (2023) which would have been fine if the font size could be increased - apparently Nokia removed that feature from the 2021 model.

I then got her a 6310, (2022 I think) and that is advertised as having adjustable font size for texts and the menu... only problem is, when you change the font size - the font size doesn't actually change

Assumed I had got a faulty one but then I went onto YouTube and found people who had made videos demonstrating how to change the font size - and in every video - the font size never changed... it seems neither the video creators or the commenters notice that. (I came away assuming some content creators are in such a hurry to try and produce the first video to get views on their channel that they failed to realise the feature they were videoing wasn't actually working)

I got her a Doro 1370, these are OK but sadly she found a bug with that... if someone with a Samsung phone sends her a text which contains a certain emojis or character - when you go to open the text message it won't open, the screen will go blank and the phone will reboot, I ordered another from a different shop but that had the same problem too.

Who'd have thought in 2024, with all this tech available that modern basic phones would be released with firmware glitches.

Who'd have thought finding a basic phone could be such a chore 🙂