Had a bit of a nasty shock earlier this week.
On Thursday I decided to take the plunge and splash out on one of those shiny new iPhone 3G things. Yes, it’s Apple, and as such it locks you into all sorts of odd restrictions, but what it does do, it seems to do with exception slickth.
Essentially I wanted something that would give me access to email and the web remotely, and that is something it definitely does.
So, I worked from home to take delivery of it on Thursday [1], and it eventually turned up in the hands of an especially taciturn delivery chap. I pulled it all out of its box, hooked up the USB, installed iTunes [2] and switched it on. And it worked! There was shiny Appleness. Huzzah.
A few minutes later, after much gratuitous flicking and sliding to admire the UI, I noticed that iTunes was chirping at me, and spotted that there was a firmware update to be had. “Ahha”, thinks I, “much extra bug fixy goodness!”, and so I click the “install” button.
250MB of download later, there is a progress bar which begins to slide and slide… And slide… And not slide… And, well, just sort of start to sit there, looking a little forlorn. “Hmm”, thinks I. And then an innocent-looking window pops up telling me something’s not quite right with the world.
Oh well, haven’t sorted out the firmware update quite yet then. Never mind. I’ll just play with the iPhone some more… Except it appears to be slightly less functional than it was. The display is telling me to plug it into the PC (which it already was), so I tried plugging it back in. No joy. So I tried resetting it. No joy. I tried hard resetting it. No joy. Um. Oh dear. I’ve just managed to turn it into a brick.
At this point I begin what became about twenty minutes of slightly desperate Googling, whereupon I discovered that the hundred or so other people who appear to have found this problem appear to have fixed it in about a hundred or so different ways, some of which involved shouting down the phone at Apple. Helpful.
Eventually, however, I did manage to restore the device. This was via a combination of reinstalling iTunes, manually deleting the downloaded firmware files to force a fresh download, then restoring the iPhone back to factory settings – lucky I hadn’t put any contact data in yet!
Phew!
Still, it was a nasty half hour. Still, at least it shows how fast the iPhone is – it does nought to brick in less then ten minutes flat.
I wonder if that’s some sort of record?
| [1] | Carphone Warehouse being one of these odd sorts who won’t delivery to anything except the primary cardholder’s address. Because clearly nobody has a day job, right? |
| [2] | Oh, the horror… |
Today’s daily doodle:
Your drawings look great!