can unopened iPhone be activated+unlocked+jailbroken?

[punter]

hey,

my friend of mine (no really) was sent by accident two unopened iphone 3Gs instead of one. He activated one of the phones legitimately, and kept the other one, waiting for the carrier to ask for it back.

Well it's been many months now, so he's decided to claim the second phone as his own and sell it. I have been telling him it's not possible to unlock the 3G phone yet, until now with yellowsn0w.

My question is, can his phone be made to work on any network, straight out of the box, using quickpwn/yellowsn0w?

This is where i get confused with the whole activate vs unlock vs jailbreak

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

Im going to start off by saying your friend is stealing. I suggest to give it back. But for academic purposes, yes you can unlock it using the yellowsn0w method.

 

[Rayfire]

Activate - so you could use the phone on the network
Unlock - so you could use the phone on any GSM networks freely
Jailbreak - to explore the hidden features err.. just more options for your iPhone

I wonder how to determine the correct iPhone to be activated if your friend has been "accidentally" sent two iPhones (well I could assume it's activated now) Were they both in a package? One was named to your friend while the other wasn't? Or both named the same?

Never bothered to call the carrier ?

 

[punter]

Yep he's stealing. His moral delema, not mine.

Actually he was mailed one and picked one up at the same time. That's where the provider probably made the mistake I guess. I'm not sure why they mailed him one when he couldn't activate at home anyway

The instructions for yellowsn0w tell you to do it with a legit sim card installed. Will it work without one of these? Maybe he could use the sim out of his legit phone

 

[tsvb]

Yep he's stealing. His moral delema, not mine.

Actually he was mailed one and picked one up at the same time. That's where the provider probably made the mistake I guess. I'm not sure why they mailed him one when he couldn't activate at home anyway

The instructions for yellowsn0w tell you to do it with a legit sim card installed. Will it work without one of these? Maybe he could use the sim out of his legit phone

If that is the case I'm sure they will catch up to him at some point.

I'm fairly certain that all new iPhones that come from either AT&T or Apple have a sim card in them.

 

[Tallest Skil]

I'm not sure why they mailed him one when he couldn't activate at home anyway

But you can now, so...

 

[Tokiopop]

I'm fairly certain that all new iPhones that come from either AT&T or Apple have a sim card in them.

Nope. Well, at least not here in the UK. Over here they give you a brand new, sealed, iPhone in a bag, with an O2 envelope containing activation instructions, your SIM (with £10 on it), top-up card etc.