More iPhone 3g woes :-)

[AndyJ]

Actually having one in your hands isn't great fun right now, either, if you want to do anything but play fun games from the appStore.

Firstly, and most importantly, during my upgrade process all my phone contacts disappeared.

This was a nightmare for me, as I am in the middle of moving an office and have lots of numbers that are hard to come by, such as BT Engineers.

On top of this, the date, time and timezone got mangled and made a mess of things. Many other settings get reset as well - wireless passwords, eMail account passwords, button settings....

You have to re-enter everything.

I simply don't understand how this happens when the upgrade process includes a lengthy backup and restore session from one phone to the other.

I had to go through a lengthly export/import process on my Mac's to clear the contacts issue up and get them back - including deleting my .mac account from the phone and re-creating it. Not something my mum or dad would contemplate doing.

Finally, the whole push eMail/contacts and calender thing is broken or not as advertised right now. As it is a new ambitious service, I can put up with this for now.

I am sure new users won't have any of these problems, and the fact I sync to two macs is probably a tad more complicated that one, but all in all the experiance has been very un-Apple like.

AndyJ.

[easygoingeezer]

Seems the whole iphone 3g thing has been ill thought out, first the you can only upgrade on-line system crashes after a few minutes, then the stores systems crash on highstreet launch day, then the activations don't work through itunes.

All because of high demand...mmm lame excuse in my opinion, if your in the business of selling and activating a product on line or via internal store computers, and part of your marketing strategy is to force a high demand on a particular date and your intention is to sell shedloads of the product then your support systems should be tried and tested first.

[andyhayley]

I did things slightly differently Andy as the new phone didnt arrive on Friday, so I setup the mobileMe first and got that syncing my macs and pcs, then upgraded our old iPhone to the 2.0 firmware. Being quite sad I did most of this at 1am on Friday, so I guess I got in before the servers were all floored!

mobileMe then went up and down for most of Friday, but by Saturday it was working fine and all my calendars got pushed to the phone and push email is working fine.

The two things I wish they had added for push is the ability to change the notification tone, I dont hear the little ding noise sometimes, and I wish you could say which calendars you can push, it seems its all or nothing whereas in iTunes you can pick the ones you want to sync.

When the new phone arrived I just plugged it in and it upgraded. The only odd things was the time zone went to 'cupertina', but the rest of the settings transferred ok.

Only snag is we still dont get 3g in the house, so as far as I can see at the moment until someone does something neat with the GPS, or O2 improve their signal its just the same as the old iPhone for us!

If the push is still not working for you, id maybe try backing everything up manually, then do a restore in iTunes as it might be something hasnt upgraded properly with all the mess on Friday.

It all wasnt very Apple like, but I think (or hope!) they have it sorted now so the upgrades are working a little better.

Andy

[AndyJ]

Thanks for that Andy, but here is the funny thing...

I upgraded my old phone Sunday night to 2.0 as I thought my 3G hadn't arrived.

When I checked with DHL on Monday I saw the neighbours had it, so I picked it up and upgraded then.

By that time I had done the MobileMe upgrade on my Macs, so same order as you...

*shrug*

[andyhayley]

What a nightmare.

I guess that might be a problem with mobileMe id not thought of.

At the moment I have a Macbook Pro I use all the time, an old iBook which I swap to when the battery goes flat, a couple of XP 'test' machines and a Vista media center that ive hooked into mobileMe, and they are all syncing and have copies of my contacts which I thought was good - lots of backups, and of course the old and new iPhone which also have the contacts.

I wonder if something goes wrong, like a failed upgrade on the iPhone and it wipes all the contacts, if that will cascade through and sync with mobileMe and delete all the contacts there, and then sync that and delete all the contacts on the computers.

That would not be good!!

I think im off to turn some to manual sync right now!

Andy

[AndyJ]

LOL Funny thing:

Just had my first push eMail. A receipt from iTunes for £0 for the 30 odd free apps I grabbed tonight in a fit of boredom.

I have read tonight that when using WiFi push can be hit or miss.

...

To answer your question, I didn't get a cascade. But I thought I might and exported all my contacts real-quick to a vCard file.

lol. A.

[andyhayley]

Yep, I got one of those - an invoice for £0 :)

Push on our wi-fi is working OK so far, but we have an apple wireless network so I guess that might help.

Any ideas what the little square with the circle in it means on the top bar? Sometimes it is an 'E' which was for edge on the old phone, but more often now it is a little o in a square. Seems to light up even when we are on the wireless connection.

[AndyJ]

No, wondered myself about the circle :)

I also think the auto-locking is working differently. When on a call I need to tap the top button to free up the screen to do things.

[AndyJ]

I installed the Dev kit and got a test app working. Only $99 to submit things to the appStore isn't a bad deal either I think.

http://www.thedibb.co.uk/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=11666&stc=1&d=1216168740

[andyhayley]

Nope, its not a bad deal at all, but for me cocoa is a drink :)

The square with the circle means GRPS - which means im not even getting edge :)

Apparently Apple have a backlog of over 1000 apps waiting for the store at the moment, im sure there will be some good ones in the pipeline.

What annoys me a little is the way they have a screenshot of the eBay app on the Apple UK page, but then its not available in the UK. All quite unlike the usual Apple!

[AndyJ]

I can do C++, but the Objective C is going to be new to me, but it's about time I learnt a new language.

Been doing PHP almost exlusively for several years, more or less.

1000 you say? Wow. I think this is one of the coolest things to hit the mobile world. It's iTunes for Apps.

Shazam has been the best thing I have grabbed so far. You play it a few seconds of music and it tells you the artist/track (and of course an iTunes link.)

How the heck does that work?

[AndyJ]

Hmm. GPRS only for me at home too then, save the wireless :)

A.

[andyhayley]

Well, would you believe it, woke up this morning to full 3G at home :)

They must have heard me moaning!!

I never even really got into C, Perl was about as close as I got but I dont think thats going to cut it. I use RunRev 90% of the time now (which most people haven't even heard of!), and obviously thats not going to work either! Maybe it is time to learn a new language!

Actually id be happy with just a small iPhone app that displayed a splash graphic / login window, then just logged into a PHP backend on our servers, then we could stick to what we know and code it all on the server, keep all the data central etc. I could think of a lot of uses for that, but thats probably cheating!!!

Shazam is brilliant, I remember when it used to be 50p a call from a normal mobile and nowhere near as good. In a way they just do the same, their little app just records a 12 second clip, then posts it to the web and gets the data back.

There should be loads of good stuff to come!

[AndyJ]

Final headache just solved....

Wondered why the phone wasn't locking or the screen was staying blank after a call...

...the case covers the proximity sensor. New case needed. DOH!

[andyhayley]

Argghhh.

Now, my sister is now having the similar problems to yours, mobileMe not working for her, contacts and calendars wont sync and just wiped out on the pc, seems to work fine for some and totally mess up for others.

Not good.

But, ive figured out why the new one had a 'yellow' tinge to the screen, the out of the box firmware gives quite a yellow look compared to the old phone, the updated firmware you get if you force a restore using iTunes brightens things up and gets closer to the old phone display.

Fun and games eh! Might even get some work done today as well at some point!

Andy

[AndyJ]

Andy, I deleted the .mac profile off the phone and created a new MobileMe account and that seems to have fixed it.

A.

[andyhayley]

Thanks, Ill suggest it to her!

Andy