Chosen Solution
My sister got a new iphone and gave me her old CDMA iphone 4, without a current cellular carrier (phone linked to verizon), with idea I could also use it as an ipod so we could send imessages via wi-fi. I was able to connect to my wi-fi, set up an icloud account, download some apps, send e-mail messages, access internet - but when I tried to set up imessages, I get the “waiting for activation” message. Read all blogs I could find on CDMA iphones and on activation problem, but found no fix or explanation for this particular problem.
So, the biggest reason that you are getting that message is the way that iMessage handles the iPhone vs the iPod Touch or iPad. The iPhone sends an SMS to Apple’s servers in Europe to activate your phone number with iMessage. It should work just fine without activating the phone number with iMessage with an iCloud account.
iphones need to send a SMS to the activation server to activate iMessage, so you need Verizon or a CDMA carrier to rome on to complete the process
Check your date and time is accurate, mine was a month forward for some reason and I had the same problem. After resetting it back to the correct date and time it worked fine with no error messages Hope this helps
