While a quick look around our site will have you reading the word “debrand” hundreds of times, sometimes it isn’t clear exactly what benefit can be obtained by debranding. In a new weekly series called FAQ to be featured on our blog, we’ll be exploring SIMLOCK’s services in-depth, giving you a better understanding of how we can help you to make the most of your mobile experience.

Let’s start with a definition: debranding means to flash generic, non-provider firmware to a phone where “firmware” refers to the software on the phone (Sony Ericsson’s flavor of Google Android on an Xperia Play, for example), “provider” refers to a network service provider such as Orange or AT&T and “flash” simply means the act of writing new software to a phone.

The manufacturing/sales process with a mobile phone works something like this hypothetical situation: a company, Sony Ericsson for example, creates a new phone. They decide that this phone will run on Google Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” and so they add to Gingerbread the code needed to handle specific functionality (such as dedicated buttons, added interface details, etc). At this point, the mobile phone has the best possible firmware on-board, designed by the manufacturer to bring the most out of the phone’s hardware.

Unfortunately Sony Ericsson does not have the means to sell the phone itself and so they turn to providers around the world to sell it for them; Rogers in Canada, Orange in the United Kingdom, Vodafone in Germany, T-Mobile in the United States and so on. These providers take the opportunity to modify the phone’s software, adding dedicated links and menus to encourage you to purchase more services and often removing features for the same purpose; an excellent example of this is the removal of the WiFi feature found in the Sony Ericsson C905. AT&T disabled the feature in order to force people to process data over their network, greatly increasing monthly charges. As you can imagine, many thousands of people quickly debranded their C905 with our software.

Debranding (remember, meaning to flash generic, unbranded firmware straight from the manufacturer) eliminates all of these problems at once, overwriting the provider’s flavor of the firmware with the generic firmware completely. It eliminates provider blocks on functionality, logos, bloatware, unneeded links, etc.

The process itself takes a breezy 10 minutes at most, making the unleashing of your phone a much less complicated thing than you may have imagined.

Ready to get started? Check out our quick and easy Sony Ericsson flashing/debranding tutorial.