For all those unlocked iPhones out there that were bricked after attempting firmware upgrades, we have some great news. It appears that Apple’s new 1.1.3 iPhone firmware rewrites either most or all of the phone’s firmware, allowing for bricked iPhones to be brought back to life. If this sounds too good to be true, watch the video above. We tested it on our own dead iPhone that was originally unlocked with AnySIM and later bricked by an attempted upgrade. This phone had just been gathering dust in one of Brian Lam’s many gadget drawers, so we were surprised when we finally had success with bringing it back to life. Getting the iPhone working again wasn’t as easy as we expected, and at times it didn’t seem like the firmware upgrade had worked, so here’s what happened.

To upgrade, we put the phone in recovery mode, then connected to iTunes and restored/ upgraded. After the phone had finished upgrading,

it would not work with our already valid ATT sim, so we had to activate the phone using iTunes. This is where we ran into some trouble, because after activating the iPhone under our existing account, the phone still did not show any signal and would not activate to our account. We restarted the phone and just like magic, were taken directly to the home screen. The phone now had signal and was clearly activated to our account. We made a few test calls, and tested the data connection, both with complete success.

For all of you out there that will state the video could be fake because it has been edited, let us direct your attention to the plastic-film that is still on the glass of the iPhone. In every shot you will see that the phone still has it’s plastic-film on, confirming we are using the same phone before and after

via gizmodo.com