Hi all,

I have a few questions about activating an iphone. But first let me tell you my situation.

A few weeks ago I bought a jailbroken and unlocked iphone 3g from ebay. It came without a simcard but worked perfectly with the simcard from my old phone. Unfortunatly the previous owner had not erased all his data from the phone before sending it to me. I decided to do it myself, by using the Settings > General > Reset option on the iphone. This seemed to work fine untill the iphone rebooted, whereupon it froze at the apple logo. This happened every time I tried to turn the phone on. I decided to restore the phone.

Now at this stage I was fairly ignorant of the jailbreak community and methods, so I assumed I could easily re-jailbreak the phone after restoring it. I didnt even know that it was possible to restore to an older firmware by holding the shift key. (If I had known this, it would have saved me one hell of a lot of trouble). After doing this I started resarching jailbreak and unlock methods. After long hours of reasearch, I realised that I had upgraded to the dreaded 5.11.07 baseband and unlocking the phone again was out the window.

This didnt worry me too greatly though because I don really mind what service provider I use as long as the phone works. So I purchased a new simcard from O2. (O2 Ireland is the carrier for the iphone in my country).

Now comes my dilemma. I dont know the origins of the Iphone I have, for all I know it could have been stolen. I really dont want it to be taken away from me after spending quite a few euros on the thing.

Ive tried to bypass the activation by jailbreaking the phone. Ive done this in quite a few ways. Ive downgraded the firmware to 3.0 and jailbroken with redsnow. Ive uploaded custom jailbroken 3.1 firmware. All of these methods have bypassed the activation screen but have left the phone with no network coverage (using my new O2 simcard). After more reasearch I have found that this is a common enough problem that is solved by legitimently activating the phone through itunes before jailbreaking.

Now to my questions:

Is there any way to activate the phone without using itunes, and retain network coverage?

Can you activate through itunes with any simcard from the carrier in your country, or just the simcard that came with the phone?

If the phone was stolen (I dont know if it was, but I have been told that im a little paranoid), is it possible for apple to brick it or track where the phone is?

The phone is originally Irish, so I know it should work with the O2 simcard I have. Any help with this issue would be massivly appriciated. Thanks for reading...

if your iphone 3g was made when it first came out you can downgrade the baseband using fuzzyband. u can find it in cydia

Tried it, ive got bootloader 6.02...

Assuming the phone was stolen (or reported as lost/insurance claim etc)

The main way to blacklist stolen phones is via IMEI register. This is shared across all EU countries.

It does take quite some time for a newly blacklisted phone's details to propagate from one carrier to another. Especially across countries.

if you were not using o2 before and did not use the phone for too long before the "reset all settings" then it is possible that the other Irish carrier you were using did not yet know that phone was blacklisted.

I doubt it though, it is unlikely. You can really only find out by querying o2. It may be as simple as only specific batches of o2 SIM cards can activate an iPhone using iTunes.