[anon(6168981)]

I currently have AT&T but am thinking of moving when my contract ends to save money. I have two questions for anyone who has service with a prepaid carrier in the US.

First, if I have an AT&T Z10 which has been unlocked, how will I recieve updates with Cricket or MetroPCS? Would it be on the schedule that AT&T or T Mobile do since it is their networks it is running on?

Second, if I have an unlocked phone from ShopBlackBerry, how would updates work in this case? Since these prepaid carriers do not offer BB10 devices I do not think they will offer the updates on their own.

[Zeridialous]

Short version:
Updates are based on the SIM installed, followed by where the device was obtained if no SIM is installed. You can avoid the whole carrier update process using autoloaders or Sachesi if you want the latest and greatest software. It shouldn't matter whether your services are prepaid or postpaid in most cases.

Detailed explanation:
Typically a device will look for updates based on the SIM that is inserted in the phone. If it is unable to find updates via the SIM, in most cases you can remove the SIM and connect via Wi-Fi to check for updates, which will then search for updates specific to a) your device and b) where it was obtained.

So lets say for example you have a Z10 that came from AT&T and had it unlocked. You insert a T-Mobile SIM into the device. Your phone will first search for updates from T-Mobile, and if there are none it will report no updates available. If you remove the SIM card and connect the phone via Wi-Fi, it should now look for updates from AT&T (you typically need to restart the phone after removing the SIM for this to work correctly).

ShopBlackBerry.com devices will typically pull their updates from BlackBerry directly, although there are cases in which they will try to search for updates based on the installed SIM as well. Should that happen, removing the SIM as mentioned above and restarting followed by connecting to Wi-Fi should make the phone search for updates directly from BlackBerry.

There's an easier way to avoid all of this if you don't want to be tied to carrier specific update schedules and releases, and that's to either use an autoloader to install the latest software on your device (this is the cleanest method but it is also destructive so you will need to backup and then restore any of your data unless you want to start fresh), or you can use a tool like Sachesi to download the latest available update. There's plenty of information on this in the forums under the following section: BB10 Leaked/Beta OS - BlackBerry Forums at CrackBerry.com

I hope this helps clarify things for you, and have a great day.