I read many articles on iphone and, from the responses, I found that some people are confused about the terminology. So, I am trying here to explain what each one mean.
Activation
Activation is the process of making the features in the iphone usable. Without doing activation, you cannot use most of the functionality. You can make only emergency calls without activating iphone. As part of the genuine activation process, you will have to sign up/upgrade for a 2-year contract from AT & T. You can tranfer your phone number to iphone if you are an existing customer.
JailBreaking
You cannot install any third-party application that you wish on your iphone. The process of breaking this restriction is called jailbreaking. Once you jailbreak your iphone you can install any third-party application developed for iphone. To go into more technical details, jailbreaking involves gaining access to the root file system. Those folders contain all the media related stuff. This is a pre-requisite for unlocking your iphone, because unlocking will involve loading some third-party applications on your iphone.
Unlocking
Unlocking is the process of making your iphone usable on networks other than AT & T. There are applications like AnySIM which is free and IphoneSIMFree which is paid, that can unlock your iphones. However, these applications work only on limited firmware versions. As of now, Out-of-the-box(OOTB) 1.1.2 firmware phones cannot be unlocked with these solutions. To go into more technical details, unlocking will involve modifying the baseband firmware to allow the iphone to work on non-AT & T networks. baseband firmware is the module that handles the GSM communications of the iphone.
Activation
Activation is the process of making the features in the iphone usable. Without doing activation, you cannot use most of the functionality. You can make only emergency calls without activating iphone. As part of the genuine activation process, you will have to sign up/upgrade for a 2-year contract from AT & T. You can tranfer your phone number to iphone if you are an existing customer.
JailBreaking
You cannot install any third-party application that you wish on your iphone. The process of breaking this restriction is called jailbreaking. Once you jailbreak your iphone you can install any third-party application developed for iphone. To go into more technical details, jailbreaking involves gaining access to the root file system. Those folders contain all the media related stuff. This is a pre-requisite for unlocking your iphone, because unlocking will involve loading some third-party applications on your iphone.
Unlocking
Unlocking is the process of making your iphone usable on networks other than AT & T. There are applications like AnySIM which is free and IphoneSIMFree which is paid, that can unlock your iphones. However, these applications work only on limited firmware versions. As of now, Out-of-the-box(OOTB) 1.1.2 firmware phones cannot be unlocked with these solutions. To go into more technical details, unlocking will involve modifying the baseband firmware to allow the iphone to work on non-AT & T networks. baseband firmware is the module that handles the GSM communications of the iphone.
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