Ok, so after hearing all of the new stuff in iPhone 3.0, I had to test it out.  I joined the iPhone dev program (which I was planning on doing this month anyway) and downloaded and installed the iPhone 3.0 beta to my iPhone.  I played with some of the new features and then loaded up all of my programs.  I then attempted to setup my work Exchange account.  I say attempted, because it never worked.  It would never get me to the step to input my actual server address.  Then I started trying to use some of my clutch programs only to notice extreme lag and some quirky issues.  Using the Facebook application, it would load all of the text and menus, but would not load the pictures for any of my friends.  Tweetie would sometimes not load all of the avatars.  Evernote just seemed to drag.  None of these are issues with the programs or the developers…it is a beta OS.  This stuff is to be expected which is why there are warnings all over the place when you download the 3.0 beta that you will not be able to downgrade back.

Of course, that is not true.  Leave it up to the wonderful mobile community to figure out that you can downgrade back to the 2.2.1 firmware, but the baseband would stay the same on the iPhone 3G.  Not a big deal.  You get an error in iTunes after the restore, but QuickPwn will get you out of that issue.  I followed the steps over at Gizmodo, but I was still having issues.  I have not had my iPhone jailbroken for a long time and I really have no desire to do it now, but if that was the only way to go back to 2.2.1, then I can accept it.

But…it isn’t.  Thanks to Jesse Miga’s comments on the Gizmodo article, I was able to get my iPhone back on 2.2.1 and activated without jailbreaking:

I have a correction for the last part of the tutorial using Windows. When you use QuickPwn the first time after getting the 1013 error, do not do a complete jailbreak or you will end up without an activation. Just go through the steps that come up in after loading quickpwn (Hold down power/home for 15 seconds, wait to reboot). Then you can set it up in iTunes as a new phone, then jailbreak. You’ll have to go through all those steps every time you restore.

The missing step was to close out of QuickPwn once your iPhone reboots and shows the graphic to plug it into iTunes.  At this point you can fire up iTunes and it will activate your iPhone like nothing ever happened.  If you have a restore for 2.2.1, you can restore your iPhone, like nothing ever happened.  Nothing to see here…move along!

Thanks to Jesse Miga for this nugget of information.  After reading the guides on countless sites, this is the piece of information that helped me get back to my nice locked down non-beta iPhone 3G.

UPDATE:  I did this on my Windows XP computer because I do not have a Mac.  The Mac instructions may be different, so YMMV.

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