7/11/08 iPhone!

Today's the day! Rodney and I promised we would wait for each other and do this magical upgrade together. He had an added issue of he had a brand new old iPhone, i.e., he had to send in his old first generation iPhone for repair and they sent him a new one in its place, so he had to activate his phone. That he tried to do before I arrived but with all the server issues (bazillions of folks trying to activate new iPhones as well as first generation iPhoners trying to upgrade their software to iPhone 2.0), he hadn't succeeded in that yet.

So we decided to tackle my phone first. We upgraded to iTunes 7.7 without a hitch, but when I plugged in my iPhone and it did its sync, it said it had finished syncing and checking for software updates and I had the newest version. But I still had 1.1.4! I tried it again, but no luck. So then we did a Google search to see what others were doing. Could Apple have really not made it available on the day they promised? We found a reliable website that had the file on it and explained how to manually update the software (hold down the option key while clicking on "update" and then pick the downloaded file). So I did that. Oooops. It ran into an error. Now when I plug my phone in, it says iTunes has detected an iPhone that is in the middle of a restore. You will need to restore it before you can do anything else with the phone. I clicked OK and then restore but to no avail. My iPhone shows a picture of a USB plug and the icon for iTunes as it would if I had a brand new phone. But every time I plug into iTunes, it detects an iPhone that has not been fully restored and when I say it's okay to restore, it tries and then fails.

Now my phone won't turn off. It goes black, then shows the Apple logo, then the combo of USB plug and iTunes logo. It does that for over an hour. The phone is getting hot! I try holding down power and home keys simultaneously and it looks like it's shutting down but then it turns itself back on again. Well, eventually the battery will wear out, I guess.

Tomorrow's another day. I'm not going to worry about it. I'll just be incommunicado for a while. Rodney and I will meet at the library at 10:00 when they open. They have free wireless internet access there. And we will see what we can figure out.