Straight from the department of slightly old news, on August 15th the ChevronWP7 project announced unlocks applied to devices via its service had expired. This means that any devices that were unlocked via the ChevronWP7 service will become locked again the next time they are synchronised with Zune Desktop. If you transferred your account to a paid App Hub account, you will need to perform a developer unlock on your device again.

So far, there are no guarantees that the ChevronWP7 experiment will be repeated. However, judging by the goodwill generated in the exercise, it would not be surprising if we see another official way to unlock devices – but in my opinion such a service will be available for Windows Phone 8 devices, not Windows Phone 7. Given that Windows Phone 8 will have a built-in screenshot function, it will be interesting to see how many people still want to unlock their devices.

In the meantime, if you want to keep your Windows Phone 7 device unlocked without paying for an App Hub account, don't synchronise it with Zune Desktop – instead use the Windows Mass Storage registry hack to transfer content on and off instead. Or use a Mac, with Windows Phone Connector?