Apple Love/Hate

My iPhone arrived, despite the fact that it was being delivered by UPS. The truck came by in the afternoon when Richard was not only awake but in the house, and the delivery guy actually found his way to the doorbell. But in the time-honored fashion of UPS drivers everywhere, he punched the doorbell once and then scooted for his truck without bothering to wait for anybody to answer. But he was foiled - Richard was only two rooms away and managed to make it to the door before the driver escaped. 

Like all Apple devices, the iPhone is a brick until it is connected to iTunes and registered. In this case, it continued to be a brick until I got a SIM card into it. This was a little scary, since it involved several kinds of phone surgery. It was my intention to remove my AT&T GoPhone SIM from my old Razr, trim it to micro-SIM size with the special cutter I had purchased from Amazon, and insert it into the iPhone. It took a strong pair of thumbs (Richard's) but we got the SIM out of the Razr. The cutter worked pretty well, although the edges needed a little trimming with a utility knife.

Here's where the Apple hate started. The damn iPhone came with instructions that conveyed practically zero information in multiple languages. There were absolutely no instructions on how to remove the SIM card: we had to look it up online. It's a user-serviceable part, so there is no excuse for this, IMHO. Anyway, once we located the itsy-bitsy little hole in the side and inserted the teeny-weeny little wire tool that was hidden in the iPhone packaging, the SIM tray popped right out. We popped in the cut-down SIM and I tried again to sync with iTunes. This time it worked. 

I then followed the welcome wizard, updated my firmware to 4.3.3, and told it to "restore" my new iPhone from my stored iPod data. It churned away for a really long time, restoring all my apps. I used the newish App Manager screen in iTunes to rearrange the app screens, create sub-folders and delete the dopey game demos I didn't really want . It all looked great, and I was breathing a sigh of relief at how easy that was *Love Love*.  Until I tried to use one of the apps and discovered that NONE OF MY DATA WAS THERE!!  Even the built-in apps like Contacts, Notes and Calendar were completely empty! 

HATE HATE HATE.  I know that all that data is on my computer in a huge directory of cryptically named files - why can't I restore from it?  Did I miss some sync setting in iTunes?

I started looking around online and discovered that no, this is just the way Apple does things. WTF???  When I replaced an old Palm Pilot all I had to do was sync it with the Palm Desktop and all my data was there. Why on earth wouldn't Apple provide that same service?  Apparently I will have to restore the database for each application individually using a different technique for each one.  I was able to restore my Contacts by passing them through the Windows Address Book.  My favorite app, Daily Tracker, provides a way to backup and restore data through Google Docs. Same with Awesome Notes. HanDbase lets me email all my databases to myself and then fetch them back to the iPhone through the Apple email tool. I had to sign up on a proprietary website to sync the data in my diet logging program. I still don't know how to get my Notes files back (although I mostly use that app for quick notes that have little value over time). 

On the plus side - the phone is now working perfectly on my existing prepaid AT&T GoPhone account. I was not at all confident that this would work.