If you went ahead an installed 1.1.1 only to end up with a Jonathan Ive-designed paperweight at the end of it, you’ve got a couple of choices: go to your nearest Apple store, tail between your legs, and hope they take pity on you and fix your iPhone somehow, or turn to your friendly neighbourhood hack-community and see what functionality they can restore.  Over at the Apple-Touch forums we’re pointed in the direction of some instructions that promise at least a partial restore; in this case, use of all but the GSM functionality unless you’re using the original AT&T SIM. 

So, if you can make do with WiFi connectivity, this might just be your salvation; basically it downgrades all but the baseband to firmware version 1.0.2 - not perfect but we’re told that the team are still beavering away.  Full instructions after the cut…

**Make sure you have a copy of the 1.0.2 firmware stored in:

youruser/library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates

**Reboot iPhone holding the top button (power) and the home buttons.
**Release the top button 10 seconds after that, right after the screen goes dark.
**The iPhone screen will appear to be off. Now start iTunes manually anyway.
**iTunes will tell you it has found an iPhone in “restore mode.”
**Press option key and then click the restore button.
**Select the 1.0.2 firmware .ipsw file from here:

youruser/library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates

**The phone will restart and there will be an error out at the end. Don’t worry. It was bound to happen.
**Shutdown iTunes.
**Launch the latest iNDpendence (Mac-only for now.)
**Jailbreak the phone using a expanded 1.0.2 file (to do that, make a copy of the 1.0.2 ipsw file, then select “Open with…” from the Finder’s action menu and use BOMArchiveHelper.app (it will appear in the menu.) The ipsw are really .zip files.
**It will flash all sorts of errors, but don’t worry.
**Activate the phone.
**It will show the SIM error but now the iPhone will work again with your Wi-Fi and your apps.