Activation

Activation Lock helps keep your iPhone and personal data safe. In the early days of the iPhone, devices were more easily stolen and wiped for resale on the black market. Thanks to Activation Lock and Find My, devices are kept secure from anyone who's not the rightful owner. A lost iPhone can even be erased remotely. Without your Apple ID and password an iPhone cannot be erased or reactivated, and Find My cannot be switched off.

Buying used iPhones on eBay or Craigslist can save a lot of money. The only problem is that some sellers may not be telling the whole story. Apple has taken steps to improve security on iOS devices, including something called Activation Lock to help prevent theft. Protect yourself from buying a useless, stolen iPhone by taking a few moments to check that everything is in order.

AT&T beat its previous iPhone sales record by activating 5.2 million iPhone units during the third quarter of 2010. A whopping 3.2 million iPhone were activated in the previous quarter with the launch of the iPhone 4. A full quarter of iPhone buyers this time around were new customers to AT&T.

Overall, the company activated 8 million smartphones including the iPhone. AT&T now has 92.8 million subscribers in the US, but still lags behind leader Verizon Wireless. Over 57 percent of AT&T customers carry a smartphone or other device with a full integrated keyboard.

Despite the overwhelming success of the first Apple iPhone launch day, Apple and AT&T did have one glaring black eye left shining after the event: countless owners were plagued by activation problems which prevented new iPhone owners from activating for, in some cases, up to three days. An unactivated iPhone is essentially useless, with functionality locked out pending activation. In many cases, this left new owners with no working phone, as swapping their iPhone SIM with their older device didn't work. The whole activation process was, to put it mildly, an abomination. Considering the heat both Apple and AT&T took in regards to the activation process for the inaugural iPhone launch -- we all could have safely predicted that Apple and AT&T would have all their ducks in line for the iPhone 3G launch, and customers would enjoy a problem-free, quick and easy activation. Right?

Evidently not. Reports have been coming in all morning about what appears to be an eerily similar situation developing with activations of new 3G iPhones. Lines at both Apple and AT&T stores

When 1.1.4 was released, many were surprised to hear the good news that they could still jailbreak their iPhone on 1.1.4 using ZiPhone designed for 1.1.3 and earlier. The bad news was that the activation and unlock capabilities of ZiPhone were not effective on 1.1.4 and even jailbreaking 1.1.4 sometimes was unpredictable. All of these concerns are now a thing of the past, thanks to the release of ZiPhone 2.5.