• Credit card
• Social security number
• Valid government-issued photo ID
• Current wireless account number and password or PIN (if you're new to AT&T)

It isn't the news we were hoping for after Scott posted earlier. Mark Siegel of AT&T public relations has now officially confirmed that AT&T will not offer GoPhone plans for the 3G iPhone and that activation will take place in-store only.

My refurb AT&T iPhone finally arrived and I found a chance to test out iLiberty+ this afternoon. After wasting a day jailbreaking and messing with my new iPhone, I just could not bypass that annoying activation screen. Yes, I could ssh into the unit and run stuff from the command line but I had to keep working my way around "Connect to iTunes" to get to the SpringBoard screen. So I gave iLiberty+ a try.

After a few false starts, it got going and worked brilliantly. I was able to track progress with the on-screen updates and not only did it activate my iPhone but allowed it to work with a disposable Cingular SIM I had on-hand. All in all, a great success.

After activation though, I could not get iLiberty to work with the iPhone still connected. I wanted to grab screen shots and the program would not launch and stay launched. (I have crash logs if any of the developers are interested.) So in the end, I unplugged the iPhone in order to get the one screen shot you see here.

Part of me wanted to deactivate the iPhone and try again for a screen grab gallery but a much smarter part of me asked "why mess with success?" Given how badly I messed up the phone several times today, that was the part I listened to. A later, complete reboot seemed to fix the problem but I was in no position to go backwards after a day fending off cranky children and an impatient husband, all of whom seemed to think there was a world outside of iPhone.

Update: No, I did not unlock my iPhone.

If you've been wanting to activate your iPhone without iTunes so you can use a non-iPhone AT&T/Cingular SIM, or you just want to use your iPhone as an iPhonePod, I have some good news for you. The guys over at ModMyiPhone have introduced a program that doesn't require you to work from the command line.

Not everyone loves the command line. It's a basic fact. And, for those of you who have been waiting for a real application that avoids using Terminal commands, point your web browser at this page. iActivator wraps a GUI around iPhone activation, and makes it simple to use the jailbreak, iASign and iPhoneInterface tools.

For those of you still worried about turning your iPhone into an iBrick, keep in mind that this is still early software. You may want to wait a few weeks for the software (and the hacking tools that underlie the application) to gain stability. Also, be aware that the public link seems to be down. You may have to sign up for a (free) account before being allowed to download the members-only version. A final note: it's unclear whether this is a Universal binary solution or (as I'm guessing) Intel-only.

Thanks Kyle

Holy cow. Those guys at fusion.osx86.hu/#iphone are geniuses. Late yesterday, I downloaded a copy of iASign, their new iPhone activation tool. Right now, at this second, my iPhone just made its first call using the SIM from my disposable Cingular phone with its $10 card. After, I dialed *777# and it told me I've got $9.25 left on my account. The phone number in Settings -> Phone shows the proper number for the disposable phone (versus the one I activated with the iPhone PickYourPlan).

After spending far too many hours trying to set up pre-paid iPhone directly with AT&T, I decided to take matters into my own hands this evening. Instead of trying to connect my newly provisioned AT&T account, I iSigned up using iTunes and entered 999-99-9999 as my social security number (as recommended by one of the more clueful AT&T people).

Of course, this failed the credit check and I was offered the prepaid plan. I selected it, agreed to the terms, and pretty much 1-2-3, I was put into the activation queue. At this time, I'm getting the "Your activation requires additional time to complete"/"You will receive an email confirmation", but my iBrick has taken some major steps forward in its uselessness.

Gallery: iPhone Prepaid Gallery

It LIVES! Update and advice here

1. Assuming you've already gone through the initial activation process and are stuck somewhere in limbo like so many others, power down your iPhone and swap out the iPhone's SIM (outlined in this downloadable iPhone User Guide - your first search result in that document for "SIM" should do it) for the SIM from your old phone. Power the phone back on.
2. Plug the iPhone back into iTunes to force a new activation process (every time you swap the iPhone's SIM, it will need to be plugged into iTunes and verified before your iPhone will work). Your activation might or might not work this second time around with your old SIM, but once you complete it, power the phone back down. Proceed to step 3.
3. Swap out the SIM cards again and re-insert the SIM that originally came with your iPhone. For the heck of it, wait a minute or two before powering the iPhone back on. If all goes well, your new iPhone SIM and iTunes verification will have finally straightened out, allowing you to use your iPhone as Apple originally intended.
   

Another quick round of first impression stuff that covers some user problems with activation, EDGE speeds, Google Maps and Mail. We're working on some more focused, in-depth posts that explore individual features in their entirety, such as Safari, the keyboard, Mail, etc. For now, let's get started with trying to solve some of these activation pains and go from there.

• Readers at TUAW and across the web are reporting all sorts of activation problems, and I'm truly sorry to hear about it, but I might have some tips that could help get your iPhone on its feet. As I recall, iTunes gave me an error message during the activation process, but the iPhone still kicked me back out to the home screen once it was done, and I received the standard 'your phone is activated' email a couple minutes later. I immediately was able to receive a phone call, and SMS and make an outbound call. I was also an existing AT&T customer, so all I had to do was add the $20 iPhone Data Plan during the process. I'm not trying to brag here, just provide context; by my rough calculations, existing AT&T customers seem to be having less problems than those who are first signing up or porting over service, as those operations probably entail a bit more work in the back-end on AT&T's part.
• There are a couple tricks that might help here: First, some owners are reporting that simply soft resetting the iPhone (hold the power button at the top of the phone for a few seconds to receive the power off slider) and then booting it back up fixes the issue. Just for the heck of it, why not wait a few seconds or even up to a minute? It couldn't hurt, and it might work some network voodoo to wake AT&T up and get your iPhone rollin'.
  
• I honestly don't know about this one as it is simply an idea I had, but: if you have a second Mac or PC lying around with the latest iTunes 7.3 installed, you could try plugging it in to see if the activation process begins again. However, remember: this is just an idea I had, and I have no idea whether that will illicit any results or get your activation process even more borked up on AT&T's books. I honestly don't believe it could do any damage, but I certainly am no AT&T activations engineer either.
  
• This is another theory that I haven't seen tested or mentioned anywhere, so take this one with a grain of salt as well: If you're an existing AT&T customer with a SIM card in your current (or - hopefully - soon to be replaced) phone, you could try swapping out the iPhone's SIM card as outlined in the iPhone User Guide (not included with the phone itself). Simply open that in Preview and search for SIM; your first result should be a guide for removing the SIM card and inserting a new one. Then plug your iPhone back into iTunes to see if a new activation process can begin. Again: this is just a theory; I haven't tested or heard anyone try this as a solution for activation problems.
• Update: More readers are reporting that turning off your old phone before activating the iPhone might help with activation issues. While this tip won't do you any good if you're already caught in the limbo of AT&T's activation system, it might help if my idea of re-trying activation with a different computer is worth anything.

• It's surprisingly fast. The best speed test I've found so far for Safari on the iPhone is dslreports.com/mspeed, offering a really scaled down page with a few download size options and no-nonsense results. I'm getting, on average, about 150 kbit/sec downloads on my phone. In light of the drawbacks of EDGE's (traditional) speed, the only reason that makes sense as to why Apple and AT&T didn't make some massive announcement of a network upgrade is that they're getting hammered this weekend with iPhone activations and people tinkering around with surfing via EDGE. If they're going to announce this at all, waiting until maybe sometime next week makes sense as the iPhone storm might be dissipating to more manageable levels where most users will see this increased speed across the country. Of course, this is just speculation on my part, but the tests don't lie: users across the nation are reporting that EDGE has upgraded from its previous 20 kbits/sec speed to anywhere from 100k - 200 kbits/sec. This is great (unofficial) news.
• Call me crazy, but I think YouTube is serving up different movies based on whether you are viewing via Wi-Fi or EDGE. I've watched three separate videos via both wireless methods, one of them user generated with crummy equipment to start with, and I swear I see a higher quality version over Wi-Fi than when watching with EDGE. Whether this means there are literally two separate files encoded at different qualities or if YouTube is working some streaming + compression magic I have no idea, but I would love to hear other iPhone users chime in on this one.
• Google Maps usually impresses me with its speed when viewing satellite images over EDGE. Simply viewing the standard map and searching for a location is almost always snappy over EDGE (sometimes there seems to be a delay, but not often), and even downloading satellite imagery is usable.

• This was probably demoed and I just don't remember, but I'm talking to enough iPhone owners who didn't know this that I felt it warranted a mention: you can pinch to zoom in and out of either Google Maps views. This is fantastic.
• Traffic reports are usually pretty snappy, again even over EDGE.
• The Bookmarks feature of Google Maps (accessible by the blue book in the address bar) is a great way to save frequently used routes and quickly get at the addresses of contacts.
• At first I was slightly disappointed that I can't hook the iPhone's Google Maps up to my actual Google Account, but after exploring that Bookmarks feature, I deem it a non-issue, at least for me.

• Some readers are asking about doing operations like deleting more than one Mail message at a time. While you can slide your finger across any single message to invoke that red delete button for just that message, hitting the Edit button at the top of any message list will invoke red buttons to the left of every message in the list. While this isn't exactly the same as holding the Command key on a Mac, selecting a bunch of messages and hitting the delete key once to trash them all, this is the quickest way I can find to perform large deleting operations.
• This seems to be the UI for any situation where you have a list of items that can be deleted; there's no way to select a few of them at random and hit one delete key - instead, you enable a 'delete mode' which makes it easier to delete more than one message, but still one at a time.
• I'm slightly disappointed at the lack of the 'One Inbox to Rule Them All' like Mail in Mac OS X has; if you have more than one account synched to the iPhone, you have to drill down into each account's inbox to view any new messages, drill back out to the accounts list and then drill back into a new account and inbox to view that account's new messages. It's clunky, but it's also becoming inspiration for me to consolidate email accounts.
  

• $59.99 for 450 minutes
• $79.99 for 900 minutes
• $99.99 for 1,350 minutes

Update: As announced, the iPhone is to be activated with iTunes, in the comfort of your own home/office/local Starbucks.

The iPhone requires in-store activation, right? Right? No one knows, but that won't stop us from speculating about the alternatives. Here are our top 5 reasons you might be able to bring home your iPhone without all the hassles of an in-store sign-up:

5. Apple says you'll need an account with Apple's iTunes store. I have little knowledge about cell phone regulation and what it takes to get a cell phone up and running but I do know you can buy a Tracfone at Walmart and get it going without waiting for an hour or so at the cell phone store for a guy to fumble around with your iPhone packaging.

4. About a week ago, I posted about the new Web Object references to the iPhone in Apple's online securebag and storebag protocols. The iPhone Activation URL https://albert.apple.com/WebObjects/ALActivation.woa/wa/iPhoneRegistration suggests that it might be possible to activate an iPhone using nothing more than iTunes--as opposed to the normal and lengthy process of getting a cellphone up and running.

3. We're still waiting for any official plan details to emerge. If the recent GoPhone plans are expanded to the iPhone, the iPhone might prove to be a simple contract-free affair--although we're probably not talking about a new wi-fi enabled $499 or $599 widescreen iPod sans iPhone enablement. If that's a SIM card slot up-top (or maybe near the battery compartment), maybe you could just take it home, unwrap it yourself and drop in your SIM card and go.

2. Several Apple store employees have spoken about buying the iPhone at the Apple store and bringing them later to AT&T stores for number transfer.

1. No human being should be expected to wait in line as long as common sense would suggest it will take to process each iPhone buyer through account activation this Friday.