But it didn’t work. The display still showed the “SIM locked”. To make a long story short, I then spent the next 5 days repeatedly calling customer service, where they listened to me tell them that whatever they’re doing wan’t working, and then made me wait 24 hours (the response time of their technical support), before telling me to try the same thing again. I must have gone through about 7-8 CS representatives, all of which kept telling me to try the same (incorrect) procedure.

What they SHOULD have told me, and what I found out after finally getting a technical support guy to call me, was to connect the iPhone to iTunes AND THEN hit the restore button to restore to factory defaults. After that, I was able to unlock the iPhone.

….which lasted for 3 hours….

After about 3 hours, I had to turn off the iPhone, and the phone was locked again! Imagine my disappointment. Fortunately, after some time I found out that resetting to factory defaults had also re-enabled the iPhone’s SIM PIN. So I was seeing “SIM locked” not because the phone was locked to the operator, but because I had not yet entered the PIN code. Restoring the phone once more, and going to “Settings”->”Phone”->”SIM PIN” allowed me to turn the SIM PIN code off, and everything was back to normal.

So the procedure should have been:

1. Have Telia unlock the iPhone.
2. Connect to iTunes, and hit the restore button. Remember not to restore from a backup when it asks you – set up a “new” phone instead. We want to clear the operator settings.
3. Browse to “Settings”->”Phone”->”SIM PIN”, and flip the SIM PIN toggle, if you don’t want to enter the PIN code every time you turn your iPhone off and on again.

I hope that helps someone. I am certainly never going to use Telia as an operator ever again. I prefer Telmore, which has always been completely reliable, and never caused me any grief.

In the process, I’ve also decided to switch to WordPress, since it has all the blog-related stuff I need, and not the extra weight of a lot of features I rarely use. Hopefully it will be easier to maintain sites for a few of my friends as well. I found upgrading a multi-site Drupal installation a tedious process. Dreamhost has a neat one-click managed install of WordPress, where they automatically maintain and upgrade your WordPress installation for you, if you can live without the ability to install custom plugins and themes. I’ve done a custom install, ’cause I wanted some plugins for Flickr integration, but it will make offering my friends and family a basic WordPress installation as simple as clicking a button.

Moving day is usually also a good time to clean out your closet, and there are a couple of things that I’ve let go when moving my site. First of all, I’ve shut down the photo galleries, since I hadn’t put anything in them for years, and I felt they were not relevant to what I do now. These days I use Flickr to expose photos to the world, and Facebook for friends. I’ve also not transferred a lot of posts from 2007 and earlier, and I’ve unfortunately not yet found a way to migrate comments from the old posts.