According to Erica Sadun at TUAW, the iPhone can be used with an old SIM card. She activated her phone, then popped out the SIM card and put in an old one. The iPhone continued to function as an iPod, plus web and email via Wi-Fi.
However, I’m pretty sure this won’t work with an unactivated iPhone — and in the comments someone noted that it’ll likely get disabled when iTunes checks for a software update.
4 responses to “Use An iPhone Contract-Free”
There’s very little you can do with an unactivated iPhone. However, you can have a contract-free activated iPhone with a working SIM by going Prepaid.
Alex King here also wrote about his iPhone w/o any AT&T service
http://alexking.org/blog/2007/…