can anyone offer advice/opinion on this: I bought an iPhone 4S off of craigslist. I can't get past the activation screens to JB it. it's verizon and i'd like to use t-mobile. I've posted before but i'm curious if there has been any updates?
OP, the odds that you bought a fully functional iPhone 4S are very slim. First I hope you know that there are shrink machines that can re-wrap a box to make it look like it was never opened, right?
Second, a Verizon iPhone comes with a SIM card. If this is in fact a Verizon phone it should have come with a SIM card. If it didn't it might be one of thos replacement phones that Apple uses to replace customer's phones. Those phones don't come with SIM cards.
Also just because you were able to get to the home screen because the lady at the Verizon store stuck a SIM in it, means nothing. How do I know this? Read on.
I have a Sprint iPhone. Back in November I had to get 2 replacements. One was a brand new retail box replacement and one was a replacement phone from Apple.
In one of those cases the phone and the provisioning got mixed up as well as the serial number. Meaning, I can still activate a phone but as soon as I restore the phone it will not activate. I get an error message that says "Invalid SIM. Only use authorized SIM cards...". However, the interesting thing is that even though this is a Sprint phone I can put an AT&T SIM card in it and it will allow me to get past the welcome screens and get to the home screen. But there is no way at this point to activate this phone.
I spent 8 hours yesterday at the Apple store with the genius guys, managers and upper level tech support trying to figure this out.
They went through 7 replacement iPhones trying to activate for me. The oddest problem is this. Once they attempted and failed to activate a phone it became a brick. No amount of restoring or using new SIM cards made any difference. They actually went through their entire stock of white 32GB replacement iPhones.
In the end the only solution they were able to come up with is to give me a brand new retail boxed phone and add it to my account as a new phone. This is no mean feat. Sprint has to be in the loop so that my contract date doesn't get reset.
They had to order this phone from Sprint corp and I'll get it by tomorrow but in the meantime I have an iPhone here I can use on wifi. I jailbroke it and I'm trying things from Cydia I would never try on my working phone. So even though it may look like you have a fully functional phone, the bad news is that most probably this is as much use as you'll get out of it.
I suspect that the phone you got will never be able to be activated with Verizon, regardless of carrier lock or unlock. There is a slight chance that you might be able to use it on AT&T but I wouldn't hold my breath.
The fact that you got an "Invalid SIM" error message tells me there was an issue with this phone and that you'll probably never be able to activate it. Dude you had to question the cheap price, right? I mean $175 for a 4S when they are selling for upwards of $450. Come on man you had to know something was probably going on with this thing.
Anyway, good luck and I hope you report back either way this goes for you.
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You guys realize that Verizon 4S phones use a micro-sim for GSM roaming right? It's part of Apple touting the 4S as a world phone, so it is certainly possible that inserting a roaming sim activated the device...
Poor guy jumped into a river full of piranhas, and he might not even be lying...
It doesn't activate it, it only allows you to get to the home screen.
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Verizon or CDMA networks don't use sims . This is sounding more and more fishey. I smell bs well thread starter said he's happy.
They don't use SIM cards but the way the phone was designed (I suspect from VZ and Sprint request) there has to be a matching SIM in the iPhone in order to be able to activate it. Yes they have the ability to get around it but if you try to activate a Sprint or Verizon iPhone without a SIM card, the activation will fail.
