A trio of developers have introduced an easy-to-use, fully reversible unlocker for Windows Phone 7 devices.
The utility – dubbed ChevronWP7 – allows Windows Phone owners to “open” their smartphones without a Marketplace developer account.
“Unlocking allows the sideloading of experimental applications that would otherwise can’t be published to the Marketplace, such as those which access private or native APIs,” ChevronWP7 devs Rafael Rivera, Chris Walsh and Long Zheng explained in a blog post.
“We’ve taken the pain out of the process involved and put together a super simple executable that will allow anyone to unlock any WP7 device on the market using a USB cable and just a couple clicks.”
However, the coding trio emphasized that ChevronWP7 was not an “enabler” for piracy.
“We are all app developers ourselves and value the financial incentives of app development. [As such], our tool only [facilitates] functionality inside every Windows Phone 7 device designed and implemented by Microsoft. We do not make any modifications to the operating system.
“[Remember], all Marketplace application XAP packages are sufficiently protected so that you cannot sideload to run them on any unlocked device (official or with our tool). We have no intentions or knowledge to break that protection,” they added.
ChevronWP7 can be downloaded here, while additional information about the utility is available here.
