14ymedio, Havana, 12 September 2021 — The complaints of hundreds of Cubans about the blocking of the mobile phones of the Chinese company Xiaomi have yielded results this weekend. “They are already unlocking all Xiaomi phones in Cuba” said Programmer and Youtuber Erich García,as he explained on his BacheCubano channel how users can connect to a WiFi network and unlock their phones, automatically.
Canal Caribe also echoed the news and pointed out that the fear of many of the company’s customers who were supposedly being charged “between 1,000 and 3,000 pesos” by private workshops to get their phones unlocked. The official channel specified that most of the complaints about their phones being blocked came from the owners of the Redmi Note 9 (Global), 9 S, 10, 10 Pro, 9A (IN), 9C, 10 T, and the X3 Pro. (Global).
While specialists mobilized to investigate the origin of the problem, the first advice that García gave on Twitter to Xiaomi users were: “Do not update the system; install firewalls and prohibit system updates; verify that the mobile is global, not regional; attend a workshop to unlock bootloader and consider global custom ROM flash.”
XiaomiAdictos shared information about the incident and explained that the company’s terms and conditions informed customers that they could not export any products to Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan and the Crimea region.
“As we can read through Reddit, Xiaomi has begun to block some of its latest smartphones that are in Cuba. The same thing is happening to Syrians, who have begun to receive a message on their smartphones that it makes it impossible for them to use the device,” he pointed out in one of his publications.
Xiaomi’s official page says in the section that refers to exports that “the contract and all products are subject to the applicable export control laws, including, among others, the export control laws of the United States and those of the client’s own jurisdiction.” It adds that “the customer may not export any product purchased from the seller to any country, territory or region if prohibited by export control laws.”
In just a few years Xiaomi managed to position itself at the top of the world market and is very popular in Cuba. According to the data offered on the Statcounter page, Xiaomi is the cell phone brand with the second largest presence in Cuba, surpassed only by South Korean Samsung.
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