What is Samsung debranding and what are the advantages?

What is Samsung debranding and what are the advantages?

First lets start of with what debranding exactly is and what has it to do with mobile phones. Debranding is, as the word says, removing the branding of a specific product, in our case a Samsung gsm. Nowadays mobile phones are being branded by many Telecom providers such as T-Mobile, Vodafone, AT&T and many more. There are logos and pictures on your phone which you can not remove because they have been build in, in the phones firmware, and the phones menu might be in the Telecom operators style. In some cases they even limit the functionality (e.g. disable full use of GPS or disable Skype etc). So debranding your mobile phone is removing this branding making the phone look like a normal model straight from the factory.

The debranding is done by changing the firmware of your mobile phone. The firmware of the phone is the Operating System that controls the phone, like Windows XP for computers. Changing the firmware on a phone is done in a process called flashing. This is called flashing because the data (the phones Operating System) is stored on a microchip called a Flash chip (you might have heard the term flash memory before). Changing the firmware can be a downgrade or an upgrade, of course, upgrading is almost always better so usually when debranding your phone with a firmware without the telecom providers branding you also directly update your phones firmware.

Updating the firmware of your mobile phone has its own advantages that would be a reason to do it without the need for debranding. Updating the firmware gives you generally the following advantages:

1. Bug fixes, as in any software also phones firmware contains many bugs which are fixed in newer firmware versions

2. Better reception, in some cases a firmware update can improve phone reception

3. Longer battery time, because the update software might be more efficient with power consumption the battery life is prolonged

4. New functionality / unlocked hidden functionality. Sometimes the firmware is updated with new functionality

5. Changing the language pack, changing the firmware also means you can choose a firmware version with a different language pack so you can choose languages that where not available on your phone before

So how would you do this debranding / firmware updating?

This process has to be handled carefully; on some models and brands this can actually damage your phone beyond repair. It is strongly recommended you dont go trying this on your own without a professional solution which made sure you cant do anything wrong or without a mobile phone professional. The difficulty and risk highly depends on the brand and even on the models from one particular brand. For Samsung phones many models can be damaged beyond repair and all the models can be damaged in such a way they show the messages phone freeze or phone locked, return for service, this however can be fixed fairly easily by a remote unlock / repair service such as SRS (

).

There are some professional remote debrand / firmware update services out there. For example for Nokia phones and some SonyEricsson phones you have DavinciTeam products and SonyEricsson even offers a firmware update service themselves. For Samsung debranding there is just one professional service out there available at

. It does not support all Samsung phones but that is because they only offer their service for models which can be updated / debranded safely without any risk for the end user.

So with this newly obtained information you can make your Samsung truly yours and start using your phone to its full extend.

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Samsung Unlocken, repareren en debranden (Dutch)

(English)