Unacceptable: Reset middle of the day requiring restore
So tomorrow is the big day for Apple. Rumors are everywhere about what’s coming – could be new iPods, could be a revamped iPod Touch, could be new MacBooks. Right now, your guess is as good as mine – but I’ll tell you one thing I’m almost holding my breath for – and that’s iPhone 2.1
Why? Because for the first time since picking up an iPhone – I actually wished I had a Treo today. At about 11am I decided to try out a new football tracking app from the iTunes store. For some reason part way through the install, my iPhone rebooted. Problem was – it never actually finished booting. Now matter how many times I did the power button / home button combo reset the phone would not boot up. It’s now 8:15pm MST. 9 HOURS LATER – and my iPhone is “restoring”.
Apple – a word to the wise – the iTunes required to hard reset / restore crap does not and will not work if you really expect people to rely on an iPhone as their primary device. My WinMo devices of old have spontaneously sharted just like my iPhone today, but I could always hard reset my WinMo device and at least have a useable system until I did a restore (usually from a backup on my SD card). So here I sit – waiting patiently for my iPhone to decide it wants to finish restoring … phoneless still after 9+ hours.
APPLE FIX THIS CRAP ASS FIRMWARE
I’ve had this happen too while installing apps. If this happens again, be patient on the reboot. If you reboot while it appears to have frozen, it usually gets through the startup sequence after 10 minutes or so. It may appear to be frozen, but eventually it gets through it.
I totally agree with you on stability. It has become reducilious… Including the time to backup on each sync.
@amanson – I figured waiting an hour and a half was long enough.
oh … I failed to mention because I was so frustrated – I spent 8 hours without a device at all because I was at work and had no way to restore. Just retarded.
This has been an issue for a while. It has happened to me a few times. At first, I had to restore completely, but ther is a known “fix”. Read about it here: http://iphonefreakz.com/2008/09/01/apple-logo-of-death-solution-swod/ . Once this procedure is done, your phone will run normally. No need to restore! Jailbroken iPhone required!!
Thanks! — that’s a great tip! I’ll have to give that a whirl – unfortunately doesn’t help much after the fact, but its a good prevention step!
I can tell you exactly what happened.
I’ve been having this problem with my phone for quite a while. As it turns out downloading an app from the app store can sometimes corrupt the app (problems with connection or whatever). To fix the problem you have to remove the troublesome app by, first, doing a selected sync of your apps and un-checking the problem app. Then delete the problem app from iTunes. Then re-download it and install through iTunes. I didn’t know which app was the problem so I removed EVERYTHING, then reinstalled all the apps again.
This completely solved the problem.
@nacho – Problem was it wouldn’t even boot up far enough to get an iTunes sync to remove the app … but thanks for another good tip for issues like this!