On 8/10/2012 10:35 AM, Jason White wrote:
Paul Dwerryhouse <paul@dwerryhouse.com.au> wrote:
My Galaxy Nexus, which I bought through Kogan, is one of these models ("yakjuxw") - and I'm still waiting for an OTA update for 4.1, three months after Google released it to the regular Galaxy Nexus phones. I have no idea when it's likely to happen. Of course, I could unlock the phone and manually upgrade it myself, but I don't want to risk voiding the warranty.
Is it possible to buy a phone that is already unlocked in this respect (i.e., open to having new OS images installed by the user)?
It depends on the phone, but normally this is easily done. There are the usual caveats about rooting a phone to update it, but as Russell has said, he has had trouble with his Sony phone. When it comes to LTE or other "regional" differences, there is usually multiple versions of each phone model -- even the iPhone has different versions for different regions due to radio requirements. Bottom line is that if you need LTE, you need to make sure the particular phone variant you buy has LTE, same as I had to make sure that the phone I bought was a proper AU stock model with full 24 month Samsung warranty. Samsung Galaxy S3 has quite a few variants, some do have LTE capability. Cheers AndrewM