Well I ran into an interesting scenario today. I have an old iPhone 3GS with a dead cell radio, so I've been using it as everything but a phone (since my temp phone, a Palm Pre Plus is just a couple ticks north of pure garbage, notwithstanding WebOS, which is sufficient), meaning it's an iPod Touch now. So today I thought it might be cool to go ahead and pop iOS 5 onto it....oops!
The installation seemed to go okay, but when powering up after the install, it wanted to activate the phone. There was no emergency dial screen, there was nothing but an activate now prompt (and in iTunes, it just said "iPhone" and "Activate"). Following the steps on the screen was futile..pick a language and location, wireless network, but no SIM installed, so that's where it stopped. Hmmm...did I just brick it?
I thought I was totally hosed because we've since left AT&T (my wife is sporting a brand new iPhone 4S with a crappy battery) for redder pastures with Verizon, when I remembered that I hadn't sold my wife's old 3GS on eBay yet. I popped the SIM card out of her old phone, put it into mine, and so even though the SIM was not active (just says NO SERVICE in the upper left), it allowed the "activation" of the iOS 5 install to proceed.
Well that was fun...NOT! Scary as all-get-out is what it was!
