My son bought this phone a while back before doing his due diligence -- spent a couple hundred of OUR hard-earned dollars -- and then learned that it was a European-only phone, argh!
From what I can gather the USA version of this phone is the A30. I do not know if the only difference is firmware, or, if there is an actual RF circuitry difference. In this day and age I find it hard to believe that Europeans would buy such a phone that could not operate if they were visiting the USA, so I'm pretty much convinced that the phone can indeed "physically" access the USA cellular system.
If worse comes to worst we'd like to be able to use it for WiFi calling. My wife tried setting it up for that, but, it wanted a PIN that would be sent via text message... to the phone. Catch 22.
If there's some other way of accomplishing this (remembering that it'd be a last-ditch option after exhausting all hope of using the device as a cell phone), i.e., 3rd party WiFi phone connection, any advice is more than welcome.
Your gonna have to visit the XDA forms brother, Ugh what a mess, anyways the short but long answer is yeah you can fix it... but it's gonna be a Pain in the butt, so I don't know if you know what Odin is or XDA forums but your essentially going to have to completely reformat and wipe all the memory from the device and completely reinstall the USA version of the phones stock firmware. So plug it into your pc and just have faith in the XDA forum them dudes are all about modding and hackin phones, really big community, just tell them your newbie to this kinda stuff and ask if they can at least point you in the right direction as well as any need to know tips or things to do prior to the reformatting and such, I'm sure theirs some pre steps prior to just plugging into the pc so let them guide you, but also find a couple hour (I really mean like 5-10hours) of time to really read and grab some concept of what all your gonna need to do, so again go the xda forum and grab some coffee and tell your little one to grab a seat, so he can join in on the fun he's about to out yall threw. I'm sure by the end he will learn something if at the least some quality bonding time. 😉 (but at the same time, let him understand that "hey look how much this careless spending has caused both of us to fix, if it is even fixable, in time let alone money" plus I'm very confident yall will both learn alot by visiting that site) take care.
IMO this is something Samsung should offer as a service. I'm sure that more than one European emigrates here, or is put on long-term "stationing" here by their employers, and would like to have their phone become something other than an expensive wifi micro-tablet.
I'd be surprised if it would not be trivially easy for them to do this, and, do it for a modest fee.
Samsung is actually an amazing company my friend, as someone who can literally say I've worked on over 180,000 devices and all the different manufacturers, brands, and everything in-between. Not many are as kick-backed as Samsung. Like if you break your screen, you can hit up their parts department via the web URL, or email, or whatever and they'll sell you the part or parts you need. No questions asked. Try doing that with apple (Don't you'll only waste your time and hate them by the time the conversations over). Please keep in mind I'm not trying to gain cool points with Samsung, I just appreciate their no biggie deal attitude. It's humble for a company that size. Now on a simi-wide note, it's really Not that common to get an alternative countries devices. Now theirs a certain type of people who travel much, even then, it's a light eyebrow-raiser. At most.
I wrote a detailed reply to you, and when I (ahem) "posted" it I was prompted to log in. Well, gee, I don't know that I ever logged out, and I'm pretty sure I asked to stay logged in. So, Iogged in (and their code was tricky enough to ensure that my login credentials were NOT captured by Firefox! Fortunately I had a local copy of them).
I then came back here -- and lo and behold, my reply was sent to the great bit bucket in the sky as I logged in. Thanks, Samsung.
So, here we go again, let's see how this one goes -- and this time I'll do my traditional "paranoid" ^A^C before I hit the big button (and I'm still kicking myself for my conscious decision to NOT bother doing it this last time!)
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First, thank you for the reply, and the info, it's genuinely appreciated. And I apologize for the hangfire in getting back with you. I am in pretty rotten health, recovering from emergency open-heart surgery (at my age, at least, having the sternum sawed in half and the ribcage pried open for four hours, as they "cut and paste" veins from various locations to transplant into the heart takes a bit of a toll in general) -- and, getting ready for some nontrivial adrenal tumor surgery. My "golden years" -- ugh!
I will definitely go over there and see what can be done. I believe I had an account there years ago, but have no idea what email I used to register or if it's even still working, so I will just use my current address and start from scratch. (I may have been asking for help in converting a GPS into an ersatz "tablet" with WinCE (it worked!), or, help with my Google tablet (I used it when I needed to download large files -- back then, we could only get dialup modem access, living in uber-rural Michigan, but, the tablet could download at about five megabytes per second from the closest cell tower, if I was in just the right spot in the kitchen where the signal was the best).
In an earlier life I was a software developer and technical editor and author -- (Que/Macmillan, plus many magazine articles, and was eventually named a Contributing Editor at Visual Studio Magazine). But, as my health deteriorated, I had to give it up, I just couldn't keep up with the rapid changes in the industry, plus, I no longer had the ability to sit there for fifteen hours, focusing on what I was doing.
In the twenty odd years since then, things have gotten so far ahead of me that I doubt I'd ever even come close to catching up if I tried. Still, I do hope to be able to write some software for those little SBC devices, to use as embedded controllers for some hopefully marketable products. So, hopefully I'll be able to follow directions enough to get this phone changed into... a phone. <g>
Again, thanks so much for the help, it's truly welcomed, and sorry for being so wordy. Retired writer, occupational hazard. <g>
