A glitch in Jelly Bean?

If you own one of Samsung’s Galaxy S3 or the Galaxy Note 2, you’ll be happy to hear that you can unlock them from the shackles of your carrier free of charge. And you can do all that by yourself, as long as your handset runs a Jelly Bean version.

An enterprising XDA Developer named owl74 has discovered a loophole inside the Jelly Bean software on Galaxy Note II and Galaxy S III devices that unlocks the SIM slot for free.

The hack is quite simple to pull off and doesn’t require the phone to be rooted or running custom software. It does, however, involve some precise timing and a bit of luck — not all users are finding success with the process, and it won’t work if your Galaxy S III is still running Android 4.0.4 Jelly Bean.

While we can’t guarantee the safety of this little hack, nor can we verify the efficacy of its claims, but several reports online suggest that the hack is legitimate.