Unlocking the Verizon Motorola Droid Pro for use in the UK

A colleague of mine arrived back into the UK recently with one of Motorola’s latest Android devices, the Droid Pro (otherwise known as ‘the one with the QWERTY keyboard’). The Pro has been raising a lot of eyebrows recently given the addition of the physical keyboard — something that’s been keeping many an executive tied to his or her BlackBerry.

The Droid Pro is running Android 2.2 and is what’s referred to as a ‘World Phone’ — that is, it’s CDMA for Verizon and it also includes a (Vodafone and Verizon branded) SIM card too. So the device will work on Verizon when in the States and roam on to GSM networks when abroad.

What do you do if you’ve been given a Droid Pro and you want to get it to work in the UK, though? Permanently?

Simple.

All you need to do is unlock it.

And I’ve done the hard work for you. I blew $19.99 on behalf of my colleague and on behalf of you, dear reader, to check if the unlock worked.

I used the service http://www.unlockitnow.com to do it. I simply gave them the IMEI number and about 3 hours later, got two unlock codes back. I typed one of them in and boom, the device unlocked right-away.

The only thing I had to do was program in the Vodafone APN details.

So if you’re wondering if the Droid Pro will work abroad… the answer is it did for me.

And in case you’d like to get a quick look at the ‘DROIIIIID’ welcome screen, I made a wee video: