Let’s just say that you have come into possession of an iPhone and you live outside of the wireless coverage area of AT&T. Perhaps you live in another country and have a demo unit in hand, or bought one on the grey market, or whatever. If you are handy with a hex editor you can still activate the phone via iTunes, and have it ready to take whatever SIM cards you might have lying around.

You need to have the latest version of iTunes installed – version 7.3 – for any version of Windoze that is Win2K or newer (Windoze running under Parallels or VMWare will work just fine). Once you have your iTunes updated, spark up your favourite hex editor and make these entries at the specified locations:

Offset 0257074: 28

Offset 0257013: 33C9B1

Offset 2048912: 33C0C3

Then add this entry to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts :

127.0.0.1 albert.apple.com

This combination works to “short circuit” the built-in iTunes connections to AT&T and force the system to look for a wireless activation server at your local host.

Finally, download and run the Phone Activation Server (source code is here if you want to see how it works) and run it. If your Windoze install does not have the .net 2.0 framework installed you have to grab it here. Then, with your phone plugged in and powered off, select the activation routine in iTunes.

Your iPhone will now magically spring to life, will full iPod and WiFi functions active and running. It will also be ready to take any grey-market unbound SIM card you might have lying around and work just fine on any EDGE or GSM network. The only thing that will be missing is the visual call ID, and I think you can probably live without that for now.

Have fun.