iPhone OS 2.0

iPhone OS 2.0 was unofficially available yesterday, but not yet officially available via iTunes. So I d/l'ed it and try to install it on G's iPhone. I already installed the required iTunes 7.7 a few days earlier.

July 10, Thursday night-
The iPhone OS 2.0 download was ~250 Mb! Wow.
Plug-in iPhone to computer, hold down Shift key and click the "Update" button to choose the v2.0 bundle. Otherwise, iTunes would just report that the iPhone is up to date.

iTunes backed up the iPhone before it began installing the new OS. This is a good thing.

Installing the OS is fairly painless, but loading the data from the back-up hung halfway through. iTunes would show that the iPhone is being synced, but the iPhone would pop-out of the "syncing" screen to normal mode. "Hmm wonder if something is wrong, or if it's just taking a long time?"

After a few iterations of this stop and starting this cycle (stop/re-install/restore) I decided to let it run through the night thinking it's not hung, but just taking a long time.

July 11 morning-
Nope. It's stuck where it was at when I went to bed.

Ok, let's do it again. Now (!), v2.0 shows up as official update via iTunes. It downloads the 250Mb bundle - again. I have cheap AT&T DSL so this takes a while. =/ But wait, this time it asks me to accept the license agreement. I take this as a good sign, something is going right now.

Alrighty, v2.0 OS is installed and we're good to go! The iPhone is now basically completely wiped aside from the new OS install. Next, iTunes will automatically re-activate the phone. But... Apple's iTunes iPhone activation servers are down because of the huge crush of people activating the new 3G ones in-store not only all across the country, but around the world.

By the now, G's got to leave the house to take the kids to VBS, and I should be getting to work. I give her my phone to use while I finish this up. (haha, yeah right) Being an engineer, I do the "let me try just one more thing..." which I hope will take just 15 minutes, but this is like hitting the snooze button again... "just 15 minutes" becomes a number of hours.

ITunes finally gets through to the servers and begins to restore the phone. After many trials of restoring, I know this takes forever. Is it my computer? Is it the USB cable? And why does it need to ping the iTunes servers before the restore starts?! I think it is to check whether the OS version is up to date.

I bust out my ThinkPad so I can get some real work done as I'm unintentionally unofficially working a 1/2 day from home now. Fortunately, work isn't super busy right now.

After what seems like a couple hours, the restore is finally done. But... all the music, pictures, videos etc., the bulk of the data, was not part of the restore. Now it has to sync all that stuff from the computer back to the iPhone. Aw man... so it's got to push nearly 7 Gb of stuff over. Rrrrrgh! But before if does that it backs-up the iPhone again. Better safe that sorry I suppose, but can't we do this later?

Sync is done, but the Apps I downloaded last night weren't synced. There are about 12 apps which are <= 1Mb each, but this takes about 1/2 hr to sync.

Finally it's all done. What should have taken about an hour or so took many hours. Oh well.