Iphone 3GS and iOS 5 ... activation required? But my phone has been unactivated for 6 months!

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!

My iPhone 3GS is now a 32Gb iPod Touch

Well, the cell radio inside my 23-month old iPhone 3GS has finally failed, after 2+ months of increasingly erratic behavior.  This effectively turns my iPhone into an iPod Touch, which is fine, since everything else, including the Wi-Fi, on the unit still works just fine.  I did not purchase an Apple Care package for it, since you don't expect a $300 phone to completely fail within 2 years, so there are no repair options available  Since I have a Blue Mikey 2.0 microphone attachment for exceptional recording, I'll be holding onto this unit for the foreseeable future.

I popped the SIM card out, and it still turns on and brings up the home screen, so I suspect I'm not going to have to do anything else to it to keep using it as an iPod.

I am, however, relegated to trying to get my old Motorola flip phone back in service...assuming the batter will hold a charge.  If not, I'm off to eBay to pick up an old used phone to hold me over till upgrade time arrives.  I AM NOT looking forward to texting on an old numeric keypad once again!

We are moving to Verizon from AT&T, since they now have the iPhone, and our contract is up in only 5 more weeks, but I don't want to settle for the iPhone 4 when the 5 is rumored to be available no later than September.  My wife's 3GS is still going strong...well as strong as can be had on the AT&T network.  So we will, most likely, be waiting until the iPhone 5 is available before making the move to Verizon.  I'm eyeing either a 4G Android handset (Thunderbolt), the HP Pre 3 running Web OS, or the iPhone 5.  I haven't decided, but after 4 years of iPhone life, I'm ready to look at different options.

iTunes decided to stop recognizing my iPhone after the 10.2.2 version update....here's how to fix it

Well, hopefully Apple monitors the Discussion Forums because more than a few of us have experienced a rather hopeless situation where, following the update to iTunes version 10.2.2, it decides to stop recognizing the iPhone.

I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, and my iPhone 3GS is on 4.3.2.  I accepted the "recommended" update one time recently when I ran iTunes, and the next time I tried to sync my iPhone, iTunes did not recognize it.  I was able to pull the pictures off it, no problem, but could not do anything with it in iTunes.

Thankfully there is a solution, albiet not a very straightforward one.  If you have updated iTunes to version 10.2.2 (or even 10.2.1 apparently) and your iPhone 3G, 3GS, or 4 no longer shows up when you connect it to your computer, here's what you can do to fix it.   The steps are outlined (kind of) in this Apple discussion forum post. I followed the instructions there, but ended up with an error that there is already a newer version of AppleMobileDeviceSupport installed, so I had to improvise a bit. Here are those steps:
 
1. Uninstall all Apple applications through the Control Panel.  My list included iTunes, Bonjour, and Apple Application Support, and Apple Mobile Device Support (AMDS).  For some reason, AMDS was not listed in mine, and yet, he is the problem.
2. Reboot your computer
3. Download the latest version of iTunes, 10.2.2 (at the time of this post) from Apple, making sure to select the correct installer, 32-bit or 64-bit, for your Windows version.
4. Download iTunes version 10.0.1 (all versions between these 2 seems to have the same version of AMDS) from Old Apps
5. Download UniExtract from Legroom Software
6. Install UniExtract
7. Right-click each (one at a time, of course) of the iTunes programs you downloaded, and select "UniExtract to SubDir".  This will create 2 new folders, named the same as the program name, containing the individually extracted installation packages.
8. Go to the new folder for version 1022 and delete file AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi (if you are using a 32-bit version of windows, the filename will probably be AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi)
9. Go to the new folder for version 1001 and COPY file AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi to the folder for version 1022.
10. Now that the AMDS package has been replaced, it's time to reinstall iTunes v10.2.2.
11. Go back to the new folder for version 10.2.2 and double-click iTunes.msi (or iTunes64.msi).  Install as usual.

That should do it.  When I did this, even though I had already been on version 10.2.2 for a couple of weeks, the first time it ran, it did a database conversion, further proving that the automatic update process was incomplete from before.

So, it remains to be seen if further updates to iTunes will fix this problem, or if some of us will be left out in the cold, required to manually replace the AMDS package each time before updating to the newest version of iTunes.  Only time will tell. 

Many thanks to Apple Forum member "ra1larson" for figuring all of this out and sharing with the rest of us how to work around Apple's software pitfalls.

I upgraded my iPhone to the .... new iPhone 3G S

I was a good little boy and stuck with my first gen iPhone 2G from day 1, 2 years ago. On launch day of the 3G S though, I lucked out when my local AT&T store had a few 32Gb models still in stock. It's black...who cares! I put it in a case anyway. They also really pushed screen protectors, which made me think that Apple had maybe degraded the quality of the screen since the original model. After 2 years, my original iPhone has exactly ZERO scratches on it. It's in an Incase leather sleeve, and I usually carry it in a pocket by itself (no keys!). I checked, but I could not, however, find any reference that Apple had moved away from the cz (cubic zirconia) screen from the gen 1 phone. I did buy a pack of screen protectors, and they are damn near impossible to install. It's so flippin' hard to get it lined up, that by the time you do finally get it lined up correctly, there's now dust and junk on the screen, which makes it impossible to get all the bubbles out. What a pain. So far, discussions on the Apple forums seem to indicate that the screens are the same, so I should be safe w/o the protector. I hope so!