Woe Is My iPhone!

I'm sitting on the tube writing this post with a pen and paper, oh, and I'm late for work.

Why? Two reasons:

1. iPhones take Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long to restore from a backup. (Think that waaa... ...aaay was annoying? Read on!)
   
2. The iPhone does so much you become dependent upon it.
   

So, from the beginning...

6:30 am. I'm woken from my slumber. The first thing I hear is the alarm on my iPhone. I wonder to my office and turn it off. Yep, the iPhone is my alarm clock and it's loud enough to do that job from two rooms away.

My mind goes through the semi-automatic dock clicking that starts Mail and iTunes syncing and downloading. Off I go to the bathroom.

I return.

Mail.app: Oooo Canon have announced a new DSLR, the 50D. Mmm, it's not the 5D replacement we were expecting. But, it does have face recognition AF in live view mode, interesting.

iTunes: The phone is done syncing but I see that there are some podcasts downloading. Let's see if there are any app updates while I'm waiting... There are, may as well have them too.

Bag packing time.

Just need to make sure all the bits of the Phase One camera I borrowed over the weekend are back in place, including the not so good UV filters the rental department uses.

Back to iTunes and a final sync. Even though there are five apps, it's only 7am so plenty of time to sync.

Get dressed, spend ages looking for shop keys, notice iPhone is synced and rebooting.

Eventually find keys, ironically, under keyboard.

Oh Dear! iPhone is still rebooting.

10 minutes later, not good! Still rebooting.

A quick google informs me of the need to initiate restore mode. Oh well, I might miss the 7:30 but the 8:00 still gets me in on time.

Unplug iPhone.

Restart iTunes.

Hold home button.

Plug in phone.

Yay! Life! But what? It's downloading the firmware, but it did that about a week ago, surely it keeps it? And why is it downloading it so slowly, 246KB/s when my DSL will do 860KB/s? Are so many users restoring their iPhones that Appl is throttling bandwidth?

Half an hour later and the firmware and software are on. Now to restore from the backup (fortunately done at 0:31 this morning, just before I went to bed.)

At this point I'll probably be a little late for work, but I may as well hang around, how long can it take to copy 6GB over USB 2.0?

Answer: I have no idea!

After another 30 minutes of waiting, the progress bar stopped moving. It was moving so slowly before that it actually took five minutes to notice that it had stopped!

So I gave up. E-mailed the shop to let them know I'd be there soon (normally I'd text, but not today it seems.)

In the end my commute today consisted not of Diggnation, Twitter and mobile e-mail, but of writing exhaustively long blog posts and reading a book (Aperture 2 (Apple Pro Training))

I haven't written this much since I was forced to at school (not with a pen anyway)!

Kinda fun though.

Maybe we all need a bit of unreliability once in a while.....