iPhone News Updated

iPhone 3Gs, the ‘S’ Stands for Sux?

I upgraded from the iPhone 3G to the 3Gs over the weekend… here are my initial thoughts.

After dropping over $300 on the 32GB iPhone 3Gs, I got it home and got it set up, with some issues, and was off on my way.  But there are some bigger problems.

First, I am fuzzy on the restore thing in iTunes.  When I first plugged the 3Gs in, it asked me if I wished to restore from the backup of my previous iPhone, the 3G.  I thought, “hm, well let’s give it a go.”  Well, guess what.  It wouldn’t let me because the new iPhone wasn’t on the current version of the firmware, which my 3G was.

Well, I started to treat it as a new phone and as it was updating, I had a power outage.  And that’s when my UPS that my Mac Mini was attached to decided to tell me that it was no longer going to give me battery backup.  That leads me to issues over UPS devices, but I’ll save that for another rant.

Well, the recovery went okay, it just put me on pins and needles for a while.  And my cussing and kicking a box scared the dog.  But otherwise, the upgrade took and then it asked me if I wanted to restore… um, okay.  And guess what, the restore went very well.  Everything except the location of my icons was restored.

This leaves me to wonder… what’s the true upgrade path?  It wouldn’t let me restore at first.  Only the interrupted upgrade let me restore later.  Very odd.

Note, the restore just gives settings.  So saved games, browser history, call history, all that was restored.  But as far as the content (apps, music, movies), the restore only says that’s what you have, the next sync will then put those things on your phone.  I guess that’s how they keep the backup times down.

In any case, as it was syncing, I was able to use the iTunes 9 app arranger to put my icons right.  Excellent.

But then, some things started going wrong.  I would have 5 bars and then no signal, instantly.  My girlfriend’s phone (my old 3G) would stay pegged on 5 bars while my phone, right next to hers, was getting maybe 2 bars.  And then, as I was trying to demonstrate push Gmail, my phone wouldn’t connect at all.  It just would spin and spin and then say, “can’t connect to server.”  Meanwhile, my girlfriend’s phone was humming along perfectly.  Made for a crappy demonstration, too.

Last night, suddenly, the phone dropped to Edge connectivity from 3G.  And it stayed like that all night.  This morning, I reset the phone and the 3G came back.  A little later, I was looking at it and it dropped back to Edge again.  Then No Service.  Then it came back up to 3G.  All in the span of about a minute.

Fast forward to this morning’s commute.  I was driving to work, streaming a podcast to my car stereo via Bluetooth, when the audio just dropped out.  I checked the phone, and sure enough, it thought it was playing.  I switched it to the iPhone’s internal speaker output and there came the sound.  So in the end, it seems to have dropped its Bluetooth connection just long enough to screw everything up.

This is leading me to believe that the radio communications in my 3Gs periodically decides to drop out, and then it may or may not come back very graciously.  Is this a common problem?  Has this been reported elsewhere?  Is it the hardware or is there something about the AT&T network that it has to get my phone totally into the system before it settles down?

If anyone has any idea, please comment below.  Otherwise, I’m thinking to give it a few days to see what happens and then return it if it doesn’t settle down.

[Thanks: http://www.dailyindia.com]

Tweet This Post 

Comments are closed.