Hi guys, I'm having the weirdest problem on my Nexus 4, and I can't find anything about it, and seems like Play Store support doesn't know what to do about it either.
This is what hapenned:
- I live in Brazil, and used my N4 here for many months with no issues.
- I traveled to the US and used a T-Mobile prepaid while I was there.
- When I arrived back in Brazil, and booted my phone with my brazilian SIM card I got no service. Not bars, no calls, no sms... just "No service". But what is more weird, is that it got a data connection from my carrier, and the internet worked fine!
- After investigating a little, I found that my IMEI was set to 0 (zero)!! and even though I'm not sure when that happened, I'm sure that is wasn't like that a few weeks before at least.
- I tried different SIM cards, from different carriers, and had the same exact result (no service, but got a data connection). My SIM card also worked fine in other phones.
My theory, is that the carriers do not let a phone with a invalid IMEI connect to the network for security reasons.
I tried factory resets, safe boot, but nothing worked, and the IMEI it still 0.
My phone has always been stock Android.
Google Play Support has offered to RMA my phone (since I only bough it in April), but since I'm in Brazil now, that would be very complicated to do (they obviously only ship phones for warranty inside the country it was bought). So I would like to avoid that at all cost, since it would cost me a lot of money to send it, but most importantly, I would not have a phone for a while!
So does anyone have any other suggestions? I can post some screenshots if that'll help.
I'm thinking of flashing it with factory stock ROM to see if that helps at all. But does anyone know if that void my warranty? Do I have to unlock the bootloader for that?
Thank a lot!
This is what hapenned:
- I live in Brazil, and used my N4 here for many months with no issues.
- I traveled to the US and used a T-Mobile prepaid while I was there.
- When I arrived back in Brazil, and booted my phone with my brazilian SIM card I got no service. Not bars, no calls, no sms... just "No service". But what is more weird, is that it got a data connection from my carrier, and the internet worked fine!
- After investigating a little, I found that my IMEI was set to 0 (zero)!! and even though I'm not sure when that happened, I'm sure that is wasn't like that a few weeks before at least.
- I tried different SIM cards, from different carriers, and had the same exact result (no service, but got a data connection). My SIM card also worked fine in other phones.
My theory, is that the carriers do not let a phone with a invalid IMEI connect to the network for security reasons.
I tried factory resets, safe boot, but nothing worked, and the IMEI it still 0.
My phone has always been stock Android.
Google Play Support has offered to RMA my phone (since I only bough it in April), but since I'm in Brazil now, that would be very complicated to do (they obviously only ship phones for warranty inside the country it was bought). So I would like to avoid that at all cost, since it would cost me a lot of money to send it, but most importantly, I would not have a phone for a while!
So does anyone have any other suggestions? I can post some screenshots if that'll help.
I'm thinking of flashing it with factory stock ROM to see if that helps at all. But does anyone know if that void my warranty? Do I have to unlock the bootloader for that?
Thank a lot!
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