Thursday, June 05, 2008

Getting A New iPhone


The menu at Chez Pierrot, circa February 2008.



My iPhone has been acting a bit wonky these past couple of months and finally took a nosedive yesterday. Whatever was wrong with it stopped it from syncing with my laptop. It pretends to sync but does nothing. Months of notes, photos, addresses and appointments have been added, syncing is critical.

Made an appointment today with a Genius at the iPhone Bar at the local Apple Store. He's a good guy. Knowledgeable, friendly and helpful. After several tests, he confirms my worst fears: the iPhone needs to be replaced and unless we can download the data from the phone to the laptop, everything will be lost.

iScrewed.

It's a bit frustrating since the main reason I purchased the iPhone nearly a year ago was to prevent this kind of data loss from happening. A working backup of data that could be accessed separately or downloaded to a new phone. It's something that just hasn't been possible with the Nokias I used to own. I'm starting to think that Data Death and wireless phones will always go hand-in-hand.

At the last minute before they took away my old iPhone in favor of a new one (under warranty), I was able to get the iPhone to sync - or so I thought. It sync'd all of the new photos but hours later, after I had restored the data onto the new iPhone, everything was turned back to February 3, 2008.

That means that all of my contacts since that date are lost. Friends, family, business associates - but what's truly horrific is the loss of the digits from women. Shit - that really sucks. So please, if you're one of my friends, family, associates or sexy women that has given me your phone number these past few months - email me. Please. Especially L.A. Liz and Russian Luiza - especially you two.

So in my iPhone world, we're back in Paris to when the last effective sync happened. Evidently something happened to the hardware sometime after Paris that prevented the data from downloading. Merde.

Truth is, I'm notoriously hard on my equipment. I really lean on them - sometimes literally. The iPhone was pretty beaten up and it was no stranger to falling from high places. All year long, I marveled at the glass that never scratched - until I managed to step on it last Saturday at the Waverly Market, placing two gouges in the glass and a line of broken pixels on the screen.

Miraculously, the Genius decided that it wasn't damaged enough to void the warranty. God Bless Him. He did say it was "right on the edge" of being voided. He was quite generous and saved me two hundred bucks.

So I've got a brand new iPhone for my trip to Europe next week. With any luck, the new iPhone will come out soon and I won't feel bad about giving a used iPhone to my mom.

But for now, my iPhone thinks it's early February.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't own an iPhone but do have a Powerbook and subscribe to Mac.com for backing up data. Can you use that to back up data from the iPhone?

Anonymous said...

Too bad you couldn't hold out until next Tuesday to make that warranty claim... although it might have worked in your favor. I'm sure there is surplus in the supply channel that needs to be cleared _now_ and being generous with the replacement inventory is to their advantage.

onocoffee said...

Rich-
Don't know if it's possible to do backup to .Mac. Might be a good thing - especially when I'm on the road.

true-
Actually, Apple doesn't replace your product with the current model. They actually manufacture new units of the same model just for warranty replacement purposes. Last year, when my 3G 30GB iPod went south they replaced it with exactly the same model and size - and it had been "discontinued" for at least two years. So, my 4GB iPhone was replaced with a brand new 4GB iPhone.