Trouble activating factory unlocked iPhone 4S

Her sim is from Bulgaria (carrier Mtel) and she's in France right now. She didn't mention getting any message just that nothing much happens other than asking her to name the phone. It can be used with wifi apps like Viber, Skype, Facebook, etc. She even had iMessages working except they would come from her e-mail address instead of her phone number as sender.

What is "activating over the air" and how do you do it? Does this mean you can activate without your computer? I wasn't aware of this. I always activated by plugging into iTunes.

Thanks.

Ok I didn't realize you could do all this with iOS 5.0. When I ogt my iPhone 4 it iOS 4.x was the latest so I still had to do everything the old way.

Anyway I found this handy walk-thru but my question now is if she somehow broke out of the activation process without completing how do we trigger it to start up again?

Maybe it even is activated and she just doesn't know it... how would she tell?

Thanks.

You mean if she can get to the App Store (she can, and has download viber, skype and facebook and they work) the phone is activated? Cool...

I asked her about the upper left hand corner of the screen and the message about the sim waiting for her to get back to me. I wonder if it's something s stupid as the sim is in upside down...

It's not a question of there not actually being signal because the sime works in her old phone.

She says regarding what it says in the upper left hand corner:

"It changes all the time - sometimes it is "no signal", sometimes is the name of the network + the bars for the service, now it is "invalid sim""

Sounds like it is activated and everything is OK except weak signal? Although what is this ivalid sim about? Maybe the sim is also old and corroded?

Can't she just do the software update like this:

Settings -> General - > Software update?

Trying this. Thanks.

By the way, a year later I just noticed I neglected to say that this *was* the fix. 😉