IPhone :: It Won't Activate After Auto-upgrade To 5.?

I won't bother repeating the problems so many are having after their iPhones and iPads automatically upgraded to 5.1, then could not get past the failed wireless activation attempts. Here is what I did and it worked. This was after two day of trying far more complicated solutions that did not work.

I plugged my iPhone into my Mac and launched iTunes. I logged onto iCloud.com, within Safari, and selected Find My iPhone. When it showed the location of my phone, I clicked on the blue arrow and chose Remote Wipe. When that was done and the phone restarted, I clicked option-click-restore and located the 5.1 .ipsw file and restored the phone. I probably could have selected just the restore button, but then I'd have to run through all the upgrading. I was then able to restore from my most recent backup and it worked!

If this sounds odd, just remember the one step that gets you back in control, so that you can use iTunes to fix the phone, is to do a Remote Wipe from withing Find My iPhone.

Info:
iPhone, Mac OS X (10.4.10)