How do I activate an iPhone 3GS without a SIM card?

If you are hoping to use the iPhone 3GS as a cell phone, you will not be able to activate it unless you put in a SIM card. The iPhone 3GS does not support electronic SIMs (eSIMs).

Note that carriers in the U.S. and in many parts of the world have shut down their 2G/3G networks, which means that in those parts of the world, an iPhone 3GS will not be able to make or to receive cellular phone calls. Maybe this is the reason why your iPhone 3GS will not activate with the SIM card from your iPhone SE.

You could try contacting your carrier, or Apple Support, but both of them will probably tell you the same thing.

As far as whether you can use an iPhone 3GS as it if were an iPod touch, I don't know the answer to that.

You'd pretty much be limited to

• Using it as a media player
• Using it as to browse the Internet at Wi-Fi hot spots (if their security settings allowed it, and if its old version of Safari could handle modern Web sites)
• Running apps that are already installed

You're not going to be using it as a platform for running new apps.

The iPhone 3GS has a 32-bit processor and cannot update to iOS 7 or higher. Even if you had a Wi-Fi connection, you might not be able to access the App Store – and if you were able to access the App Store, I don't believe that you'd find much if anything that would run on an iPhone 3GS in it. That phone and that version of iOS are too old, and app developers long ago moved on.

BarraTurbo wrote:

is there any aftermarket support for the 3GS, so that I can fix the sim card slot thing?

There is no "fix" for carriers in Australia shutting down their 2G/3G networks – other than to replace the iPhone 3GS with a more modern phone that can operate on the cellular bands those carriers currently support.

I'm not sure what the deal is with early iPhones – whether they had to be activated with carriers to be able to do anything at all. But if the deal is that the phone has to be activated with a carrier to do anything, and the carriers in your part of the world don't support activation any more, that would seem to be that.

BarraTurbo wrote:

I live in Australia, 2G and 3G are down. That renders the phone useless. Is there any way to jailbreak or reinstall a modified iOS 5 without needing to activate with a SIM card?

iPhones have never supported downgrading iOS.

As for how to jailbreak an iPhone, or install a modified version of iOS, I do not believe Apple wants us discussing that here.

A phone of that age generally has no economic value. Recycling is just the right thing to do.

No parts are available for 3 GS iPhone. Your best bet is to find a used one and swap parts. But you’re replacing parts that are broken with parts of equal age, that can suffer from the same failure at any time.

I think the change was the introduction of iPhone 4 or 4S in regard to activation. I’ve a 4S with no SIM card and it functions just fine. If I recall correctly, activation was done by the carrier, not Apple for first few generations of iPhone.