iPhone Success: Just a Little More Grief

D'oh! Looks like the phone works fine but just not with iTunes. I can make and receive calls, watch YouTube videos, surf the web from my WiFi connection. Just can't sync with iTunes so no address book, music, or video.

Grrr, it's always something.

Ok, here's the deal. Via the iNdependence program, I activated the re-virginized iPhone with my Mobifone SIM card. iTunes didn't like that at all and gave me the IMEI error message above. I'm using iTunes 7.4.2 on the Mac so I figured maybe I should downgrade to 7.4.1 to see if that made a difference. Luckily I wasn't able to find this version of iTunes since it would have been a waste of time. I put back my old AT&T SIM card and re-activated the iPhone using good old iNdependence. After that I was able to sync everything with iTunes again. This is nice, but not great. I still want things to work with Mobifone. So I swaped the Mobifone SIM back in and tried to sync, but iTunes wouldn't have it. This time it complained that the phone wasn't activated. Aha! I just need to activate the Mobifone SIM again. So back to iNdependence for another activation with the Mobifone SIM and it looks like we're golden.

So my advice is to stick with iNdependence and avoid all the AppTap/minicom drama. Follow the iNdependence readme (with the original AT&T SIM card in your phone) and this will keep things simple.