Q: My iMessage still says "Waiting for activation..."

Just have the Date and Time setting on Automatic, that seems to be the problem for me. After I set it to Automatic, worked like a charm.

my time and date setting is set to automatic and still no joy? any other suggestions mate?

i got a solve, when you turn on imessage then there text will appere "your career may charge for send text massage" or some thing else, there i have selected "cancel" not selected "ok" , that time i found imessage activated...

its strange but worked for me.

I got it to work. Finally. After 2 days of failed attempts and countless hours of google, I figured it out myself.

I put my iPhone in DFU mode. (Just google how to put your phone in DFU). And then did a clean restore of iOS 5. Now Facetime & iMessage are working great!

riajul is right. it worked for me too

Did you manage to restore from a backup or did you have to do a completely clean restore?

While it's true that iMessage activates itself after you have clicked cancel, it didn't fully activate itself. What you did was activate iMessage via e-mail, so you can only send messages with your e-mail adress. That means if somebody who had activated iMessage on his/her iPhone wanted to send you a text by typing in your cell number, it won't work, they'd have to type in the e-mail adress you assoiciated iMessage with!

Hey, when I enable my iMessage nothing pops up on the screen about additional charges, it just enables and ten says waiting activation, :/

I'm going to try another fresh load with another downloaded copy of ios 5, but I don't see if that will make much difference :(

I'm getting the same error message. I am also unable to receive text messages of any kind. I haven't been able to get ahold of Apple. Can someone please help! I can send texts..but not receive them..and iMessage continues to be unsuccessfull in activating.

i tried factory restoreing my iphone4 but nothing changed :S , is there another way to do it ??

Yes indeed, it was an unfinished IOS5 upgrade after all.

When connecting my iPhone4 to Itunes again, it said that a previous restore action was not completely finished and asked whether I wanted to continue the restore. Of course, I went for the yes and after iTunes finished the restore, iMessage was activated (and I got all my music back as well, which was another issue i didn't understand :-)) 

I did a Clean restore.

Same issue here on my 3GS.

I've restored many times, including in DFU mode, with no luck.

Just says "waitinf for activation" - I can use an email, but not my phone number. I want to send/receive from my phone number.

Others with the same phone and carrier do not have any issues.. any help is appreciated.

Cheers

Same thing with me, iMessage is activated. But on my email, not my phone. Infact I don't even have the phone number tab there. >.>

Just a FYI to anyone reading this thread...

I had several 'strange' events happen when using my 4S. I activated my 4S and restored my iP4 backup to it using iTunes.  The iMessage (and FaceTime) "Waiting for activation..." was just one of the 'strange' events.

After trying everything found on the internet yesterday without success, I finally decided to bite the bullet and start fresh.  I executed Settings->General->Reset->Erase All Content and Settings.  When that process completed I reinstalled all of my apps, music, etc., which was a major pain, I'll admit but for me it was worth it.  Since then I have not had a single 'strange' problem--or even a normal problem.  Everything has worked flawlessly.

I am convinced that there is something about restoring from a iPhone 4 backup that caused my problems.  It may be unique to my situation, but with so many experiencing similar problems I wonder...