How To Bypass iPhone’s Activation Screen Using Bug In iOS 5.1

In March, Apple released the iOS 5.1 just after the release of the new iPad 3. The new features of the iOS 5.1 included Japanese language support for Siri and a new tweak in the Photo Stream that allows the users to delete a particular picture from their albums. One of the important reason that force Apple to release the iOS 5.1 update soon was the battery drainage issue that caused a lot of problems for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S owners. The iOS 5.1 successfully overcome the battery drainage problem, but still iOS 5.1 has some bugs that need to be fixed. One of them is an activation screen bug, using which users will be able to bypass the activation scree of the iPhone.

Actually users need to activate the iPhone when they power up the device very first time in order to use it. To activate the iPhone, you must have an SIM card that will allow you to activate the device. However because of the bug in iOS 5.1 users can directly go to the Home Screen or SpringBoard without using any SIM card.

Once you power up the brand new iPhone without any SIM card it may stop on the activation screen with an error of "SIM not valid or Activation Failed Error." From here you can now bypass the activation screen, first you need to press the Home button that will show the different options. From there you need to tap the "Emergency Call" option and dial any emergency number and without wasting the time press and hold the power button. Once you saw the "slide to power off" simple tap on "Cancel", by doing this your device will go back to the "SIM not valid or Activation Failed Error", now tap to "Touch to return to call" and simply end the call. It's over, if you go through the procedure in a same way that described above, then you successfully bypassed the activation screen and you are in the SpringBoard of the iPhone. If not, then I'm afraid you have to repeat the process.

Using this procedure you will not be able to use Siri and app switcher, but you can still browse internet and use some other apps as well. One thing that needs to note is that this method to bypass the activation screen is only tested with iPhone 4Srunning on iOS 5.1, so there is no guarantee that this method is compatible with other iPhone devices. Thanks to the HowToArena for pointing this bug.