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Yesterday, I wrote about my problems with an offically-unlocked iPhone that suddenly detected it had a new SIM and needed activation. Today, I downloaded and installed iTunes on my Windows 7 notebook PC and borrowed a sync cable to connect the phone and activate it. Here are a couple of things I found on the way:
- My organisation mandates a PIN lock on my phone. I couldn’t remove this using the unactivated iPhone and iTunes wouldn’t activate the phone (even though I supplied the PIN when the iPhone prompted for it). So I borrowed a handset from a colleague, dropped my SIM in it, turned off the PIN lock, and put it back in the iPhone to attempt activation.
- iTunes on Windows uses Internet Explorer’s proxy settings so getting past the corporate proxies to the iTunes Store for activation was not too big an issue; however it still refused to activate my phone, returning a strange error code -9808. The answer is to turn off Internet Explorer’s check for certificate revokation (and restart the browser), after which I was able to activate my phone.
Now, I’ll make sure that I have a bent paperclip (iPhone SIM removal tool) and sync cable in my bag when I go to work… just in case my iPhone falls out with its SIM again.