I was finally able to update my iPhone last night. After days of fighting with the software, which continued to freeze while registering, I updated to 2.0 firmware only to find that all of my contacts an email accounts were gone.

I don’t use a Mac and I have the 2G iPhone. I had no intention of subscribing to MobileMe since the iTunes synch works fine for me (and everyone seems so upset with it). Everyone else whose contacts were lost had them backed up on MobileMe. So finding help online was extremely difficult. I didn’t bother calling Apple since online reports said that neither the ‘geniuses’, nor the phone operators had any fixes.

4 hours later after lots of machinations with the files on the iPhone that I should never have to touch, I re-restored to an old backup of my iPhone that did have all of my contacts. I’d tell you how I did it, but I can’t find the links anymore – I was too frustrated (and too tired) to blog about it right after finishing.

So I now have everything working and even got the WordPress App. Very cool, except I can’t create links on my iPhone because Apple STILL hasn’t figured out copy/paste. *sigh*

I have the original iPhone, and I waited until Sunday to try to upgrade my firmware to 2.0 (thanks to TechCrunch). For whatever reason, it didn’t work. Not only did it not work, but I then I had to restore my iPhone. I’m always worried when I have to do that, but it wasn’t working at all, so I clicked the button.

iTunes would not complete the restore process. It went through, updated the firmware, restored all my data and then wouldn’t verify the software. I left it for 2 hours trying to verify the first time, then had to end iTunes because it was frozen in that state. My phone had the connect to iTunes image on it and wouldn’t reset or anything. I tried restoring it 4 different times yesterday, and once again this morning (letting it sit here for 4 hours trying to ‘verify software’).

I finally gave up and called the iPhone support line. A half hour into waiting for a customer service rep, I decided to try running restore on my work computer. And it worked! So now I’m re-syncing on my laptop (where iTunes now magically works!).

This was my first super negative experience with Apple customer service. There is absolutely no info on their website – aside from the most basic tutorials. The user support groups aren’t that useful. And I couldn’t find any other support groups with this same problem. Then when I called the help line, I had to run through the same processes as the tutorials with the robot on the phone. After 20 minutes of that (including 1 hang up because I couldn’t get back to the main menu), I finally got put on hold and was told the wait was “extensive”.

But my beautiful iPhone is back! And now with the 2.0 firmware I can download apps. I can’t wait for the sync to finish!

Yes, this is how Apple gets you.

UPDATE:
Well, I no longer have an iBrick, but I also don’t have v2.0 firmware either. I tried installing it again and it got stuck Verifying iPhone software again. So I just ran through the whole restore and sync – again using a different computer to restore since iTunes on my laptop was screwing up.

I guess I won’t be playing with my apps tonight. sigh