I upgraded my wife's S22 to a new S24 and picked it up at a local Rogers store today. I wanted to set the new phone up using SmartSwitch before actually transferring the SIM - and I have done this in the past. In fact just this week I did that with a Pixel upgrade on my primary line.
Imagine my total surprise when turning on the new phone to find that after WiFi connect, the first thing it wanted to do was connect to a mobile network and demanded that I insert a SIM BEFORE I could get the phone into any mode for data and setting transfer. It did not want to set up a google account or any other setup until the SIM was inserted.
It said it needed to find a mobile network and was not going to budge until I satisfied that. No way to skip it. My Pixel upgrade had no such restrictions earlier in the week, and I did not insert my old SIM until I was ready to actually make the final transition and had everything set up on the new phone the way I wanted it....
I did manage to get around this as I found a trick detailed on the internet where you can tap in the 4 corners of the phone in 3 rotations and then press volume down and sure enough a pop up came up to say something like SIMLock unlocked or some such message.
And then I could use Smart Switch and set up the new phone.
What was that all about? I don't think the phone was "locked" per se, but clearly carrier restricted in some way (Rogers? Samsung?) to need a SIM card inserted before even getting to step 1 of the setup. Is this a Samsung-imposed restriction I wonder? I have upgraded Galaxy phones several times over the years an have never encountered this? Did I do something wrong? Will I get a nasty surprise when I finally do put the old SIM into the new phone?
