Buzzin Mobiles

I love my Apple iPhone.  It is by far the best, most fun mobile phone I have ever used for personal and business use, except for two points.  The battery drains too quickly and iTunes is a useless piece of software that Apple need to improve, if they are serious about competing with Blackberry as the number 1 mobile phone for business.

After having ridiculous problems downloading and installing previous versions of to my iPhone 3G mobile phone, it was with a heaped spoon of trepidation that I reluctantly to download ate latest version of iTunes.  So why download the iTunes update if you have had a history of problems, you may ask.  The answer is my business pays for four iPhones on a 24 month contract.  If there is an updated version to the mobile phone software then I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect to be able to download it.  But downloading software updates from Blackberry and Nokia has never been a problem in the past.

As before, the downloaded started and appeared to be 90% complete before I am greeted by, one has become the most annoying popup window of the most frustrating software I have used in the past 12 years as an I.T. professional.  It reads:

“iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode.  You must restore this iPhone before it can be used with iTunes.”

For those yet to be enticed by the superb iPhone marketing machine, your time will come; and for those already owning an iPhone, I am sure you have encountered this ridiculous problem.

The problem being that if your iPhone fails to download the software update successfully, instead of simply failing to update, your mobile phone becomes locked in a state of uselessness, and the only option is to ‘restore’ your mobile phone to the original factory settings.  Great!  So I lose all my contacts, calendar dates, notes, photos, music, apps and other personal data.  This is very irritating and time-consuming for personal use, but totally unreasonable and useless if, like me, you are running a small business and your mobile phone is the centre of all your business communications.

I have found the best way to tackle this problem, which unfortunately is only a solution to saving your data but can do nothing for the amount of time you will spend installing the latest version of iTunes on each iPhone mobile device.

Firstly, always make sure you save a backup from your iPhone before you consider updating the iTunes software. At this stage, make a list of the Apps on your iPhone as these will not automatically be reloaded.  Then disconnect your iPhone from your computer and download and install the latest version of iTunes on your computer.

Restart your computer before connecting your iPhone again.  This confirms that the latest version of iTunes software has been successfully installed.  Only then should you attempt to update your iPhone.  Once your iPhone updates successfully (and this still may take several hours or more) iTunes will ask if you want to create a new iPhone account or add the latest backup of whatever you have named your iPhone.  Choosing the latest backup will restore your contacts, email account settings and mail, texts and music. For some reason it doesn’t restore any downloaded Apps or a passcode.  These will have to be downloaded and installed manually.

Today I spent over two-and-a-half hours attempting to retrieve my iPhone from cyber limbo, and in the process missed three important business calls and in the process of restoring my data, lost one voicemail and 2 text messages.  And just in case you think this is something to do with me, my computer or a poor internet connect, I have spoken to many iPhone users over the past two months and all of them have experienced the same problem.  Furthermore, I have encountered the iTunes problems on several computers on several good quality home broadband services, none of which have problems with any other software.

So, in conclusion, after three months of using an iPhone I can confidently say it is a good phone and the Apps make it great fun for personal use.  But the iTunes issue means I will be returning to a Blackberry for business use, unless Apple can offer a more reliable solution to the iTunes download problem.