I Love/Hate my iPhone 3G
I have been doing anyone who reads this blog a disservice. I don't post regularly with new cool and interesting things, as surely they must happen in RT (Real Life - not on the Net).
That is especially true for anything iPhone related, as I am a self professed iPhone Guru and have hacked, jailbroken, restored, erased, copied, and basically tried ALL the cool things you can do with an iPhone. I had third party apps running as soon as a command line jailbreak was available and have used/tried every utility that jailbreaks iPhones ever since it could be done. On all firmware versions... you get the picture.
In any case, while I do adore my glossy white iPhone 3G, since iTunes 7.7.1 and firmware 2.0.1, I have been PLAGUED with mysterious freezes and startups that suddenly cause all my App Store applications to suddenly stop working and for my iPod to suddenly say it is empty of content! Please note that all the default iPhone apps still work fine, as do any apps installed via Cydia. Heck, at one point I checked out some of the hacked store apps and even They continued to work, but not my Hundreds of $ worth of paid-for apps and all my music and video content. Interestingly enough, the music and video content still showed in iTunes on my Macbook Pro and could even be played by the computer. The only solution so far has been a complete Restore and then a clean install of all my applications again. HOURS worth of work, just to be repeated again within 24 hours.
Here is a link to some discussions at Apple:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1644828&tstart=0
After having tried all the "quick fixes" and all the other "solutions", I finally found one that has seemed to WORK! At least for me it does. I downgraded my iTunes from 7.7.1 to 7.7 and have had all my problems above DISAPPEAR! Hooray! (does Snoopy Dance for those that remember what it is). While I am certainly happy that it seems to have solved my spontaneous crash and "lose all my apps" issue, I am disturbed that I had to revert to an older version of iTunes. That is Severely disappointing to me. Certainly a "downgrade" should never be an acceptable solution and it irks me to have done so. But I am a Happy iPhone user again! :-)
I would also like to note, as rumor has it, that Steve Jobs commented internally at Apple regarding my issues above and stated that the "bugs" (apps crash and media disappears from ipod on iphone) are known and should be addressed in an upcoming September firmware update. FINALLY! But that means the 2.0.2 firmware update will not help me :-(. I guess I will be staying at iTunes 7.7 until September then.