Upgrading to iPhone 4S

My phone finally arrived yesterday, but that is just when things got even more interesting. Here I am with a brand new iPhone, but no internet, and no micro SIM.

Of all the days in the year, my cable provider decided to do maintenance on the one day in the past three years that I have a new iPhone….and to do it all day. To boot, the micro SIM cutter that I had ordered off eBay had still not arrived. So the big question was how do i activate my new phone and start using it? I had waited enough.

Cutting your own SIM

The first step was to cut the SIM I had so that I could even get the phone going. This was much easier than I thought. Using a box cutter and a co-workers iPhone 4/SIM I only had to go over each line a couple of times, before the SIM would just easily break on that side. The measurements were rough, but it fit in the SIM holder.

Activating without internet

This was a little harder, but tethering is not as restricted in Canada as it is in the US so I used the second iPhone 4 to setup a personal hotspot. The issue was the with the update to iOS 5, somehow the personal hotspot feature was not available any more, so I had to reset the networking to get that going.

Now I had a new micro SIM and connection to the internet to activate the phone.

Success! … sort of

After activating the phone and restoring it, I ran into another issue that I could not resolve. The phone just refused to receive cellular signal. Even though this worked just fine during activation and restoration, all i got now was No Service.

It all worked out in the end after a long visit to the Apple Store to replace my brand new phone:)

Lessons learnt

1. Cutting a SIM down to a micro SIM is relatively easy (my SIM cutter finally arrived today)
2. Resetting the network settings will get you back your Personal Hotspot settings
3. Typing diag:// in Safari will bring up a diagnostics window that will send info to Apple. You won’t see the diagnostics, but I did not know about this feature
4. Siri is absolutely the best feature of the iPhone 4S, but its rather useless in Canada