Need help...Used 1st Gen. IPhone Activation

[Randall81]

So i just got my friend's 1st gen, 8gb, iphone (orig. sim card incl). So i then hook up the phone to my imac and opened my itunes acct, the devise read/syned to my computer but no prompting/option to activate the Phone. As of right now, it's set up like a itouch without the phone. How do i activate the phone of a used 1st generation iphone? My goal is to set up a month to month plan (none of that B.S. 2yr contract) w/ the cheaper data plan.

(fyi - i went to the apple store and was told to go to AT&T or TMobil, he said Tmobil are the better provide out here in AZ. Anyways, i mentioned this was the first gen. iphone but he insisted that i need to go through a phone provider for activation. So i confidently walked into AT&T and all i got was, "can't do that hear, you need to set up a itunes acct and do it yourself but if you buy a new shinny iphone 3g or s, i can do all that for you right now." As you can see i talked to a Apple Store guy and i thought i would get some good tech advice but only got a, go to phone provider answer. Went to the phone provider and only got a sales men. Help!!!!!

RW

[abijnk]

First decide on a carrier, then do the following:

AT&T - Go to the store and tell them you need a new SIM card. They will give you one, then you can go back and activate the phone through iTunes. Like the AT&T guy already told you, they can't activate the first gen iPhones in store, but the reason you weren't able to activate it yourself is because you don't have a valid SIM card. SIMs are tied to phone numbers, not phones.

T-Mobile - If you choose to go with T-Mobile you will need to unlock the phone (see the hacks forum and/or google "iPhone Dev Team"), and then pop your T-Mobile SIM into that.

[Moi un Mouton]

I'm assuming that you want to unlock the phone so you can use any carrier, so follow these steps:

1. Put the phone into DFU mode and connect to iTunes. It will do a clean 3.0 install. How to do DFU: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpinyGlQ8I

2. Unlock the phone using RedSn0w, follow this tutorial to get everything you need to do that:
http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=4304

3. Put in a working SIM card