Mom wants to learn how to use a computer...again.
I left my old Mac Mini at the house for my family to use, but realized that it's not getting used very much, so I took it back to my apartment. My mom freaked out when she found the thing missing. She was worried because there wasn't a computer in the house, even though no one in the house ever uses the thing. This is definitely one of those "wanting to have something just in case" paranoias. I think I got that gene from her because I have trouble throwing stuff out if there's even a 1% chance that I'll need it sometime in the future. Anyway, she went on and on about wanting to learn how to email and how she has to learn to use computers. She tried learning once before and gave up on it pretty quickly. To appease her, I decided that I would give her my old first generation iPhone which wasn't getting used at all.
My intent was for her to use it at home as an iPod Touch for browsing the internet, email, and maybe an app or two. Then I got to thinking, why not just take the sim card from her current phone and pop it in the iPhone? Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. I popped in the sim and the "connect to iTunes" image shows up on the screen. I realize that I have to activate it through iTunes which means that I most likely have to sign up for a data plan. I called up AT&T customer service to double check if that was the case, and they tell me that exact thing. I know this isn't a technical limitation, and it's irritating that customers are forced into these data packages that they don't need.
I had jailbroken this phone a while back, and I thought I had unlocked it too, but that couldn't have been the case if I was getting the "connect to iTunes" indication. (There is a difference between jailbreaking and unlocking. Unlocking allows the iPhone to be used on different compatible carriers. As far as I know, you can't unlock without jailbreaking first.) I did some research to figure out how to unlock an old first generation iPhone, hoping that it wouldn't be too complicated. I really didn't want to spend the whole day getting this phone to work. Surprisingly, it's fairly easy to unlock a first gen iPhone. You just have to go into Cydia (think of it as an app store for jailbroken iPhones) and install an app which will do all the work for you. I was pretty relieved at this point. I clicked on Cydia and it just crashed. Oh no. I clicked on the icon again and the same thing happened. Crap. Cydia wasn't working. That threw a huge monkey wrench into the process of unlocking this thing. A simple process just became a whole lot more complicated. Back to the Google I went.
I won't bore you with all the details of how I got the phone unlocked. To be honest, I don't remember all the steps that I went through because this was weeks ago. I should have documented it all for those that are in a similar situation, and to those people that may come across this in hopes of finding a detailed step-by-step solution, I apologize. To summarize, I had to re-jailbreak the iPhone using a different method, which would also unlock the phone at the same time. There are different teams/people that work on jailbreaks, so there are always a few ways to do it. I used quickpwn (the one with the pineapple) to perform the jailbreak and unlock. Once the phone was unlocked, I popped in the sim card and, voila, the phone had a cellular signal, but most importantly, I didn't get the connect to iTunes indication.
There are a few important things to remember if you go this route. Just because you don't have a data plan does not mean that you don't have access to cellular data. If you do access the internet over the cellular network then AT&T will charge you. I don't have that problem because I had disabled internet access on my mom's account because she would accidentally press the "web" button on her "dumb phone." There are jailbroken apps that will disable cell data access, which you should install and run immediately if you don't want to get charged for using cell data. I would tell you which one to install, but I didn't have any luck getting Cydia to work again. You're on your own with that one.
So far my mom hasn't sent a single piece of email yet, but she is texting every once in a while which is pretty funny to see. I never thought I'd see the day. It seems to have satisfied her "tech itch" for now. I wonder how long it'll last.