My 2GB, 4 day 0.0.1 iPhone update

A few days ago, Apple released version 3.0.1 of the iPhone OS, which addressed a pretty major SMS vulnerability.  When Olyvia tried updating her 3GS to 3.0.1, something went wrong.  The iPhone entered “Recovery Mode”, which means that it displays an image indicating that you need to connect it to iTunes, and you can’t do anything else (no phone calls, no iPod, no applications – absolutely nothing).  Connecting the phone to iTunes prompted a message indicating that the phone needed to be recovered – doing so downloaded the 3.0.1 update, and then got stuck on the “Verifying Restore with Apple” step for a long time, until it would finally fail with error “3104”.  This process could then be repeated, with the same results.

What this meant in practice was that the phone was bricked as of last Friday.  An update should never be able to brick a (legitimate, not jailbroken) phone! Even more, failing to verify a restore with Apple should never leave the phone in a broken state.

I tried many thing to resolve this:

• Restoring on three different computers (three OS X Leopard, one Windows XP).
• Using three USB cables.
• Using two Internet connections (different router, different physical location, different ISPs).
• Restoring with five different user accounts, including one that was created solely for this purpose.
• Removing iTunes and the Mobile Device helper completely and reinstalling.
• Restoring with an administrator account (both OS X and Windows XP) and a standard account.
• Redoing the restore at many different times of day, including times when most of the US would be asleep (so the server load should be fairly low), over Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

None of this worked.  It did mean that I downloaded the 300MB+ update six times (one for each user account and once to refresh) over the four days.  That combined with the iTunes installation brings the total download cost to around 2GB.

I eventually gave up.  Google found many other people with this problem, but only a single solution, which involved opening a terminal connection to the phone and changing an environment variable.  I wasn’t particularly comfortable doing that, since if something goes wrong I want Vodafone/Apple to just replace the phone without any argument.  Since there isn’t any real support available over the weekend, I waited for Monday morning.

I wasn’t sure whether to contact Apple (expecting a “please call Vodafone” answer) or Vodafone (expecting a “what do you mean you updated your phone?  Can you do that?” answer).  Thankfully, Vodafone NZ has a very responsive and helpful Twitter presence (@vodafoneNZ).  I tweeted, asking who to call, and was asked for details.  I provided these (going into more detail in an email), and got back a (unfortunately not helpful at all) suggestion.  Since that didn’t work, Paul Brislen provided me with an 0800 number for the “iPhone Team” (I’d call them “iTeam”, subtitled “there’s an ‘i’ in iTeam”, but anyway…).  Unfortunately, since I had to do a lot of travelling and offline things on Monday, I wasn’t able to get to this until Tuesday.

I certainly appreciate a (free) phone number I can call.  However, I don’t have a great deal of time to spend talking on the phone, explaining a rather complex problem and the many steps that I’ve already done to try and resolve the problem.  I also have poor cellphone coverage (Vodafone’s fault) and a rather noisy landline (Telecom‘s fault), so voice calls aren’t a great solution to a problem.  Faced with a (presumably) long and difficult phone call, the ‘hack’ solution of altering the environment variable looked a little more appealing.

I downloaded iRecovery and opened a terminal (shell) connection to the iPhone.  Typing “printenv” gave a list of the environment variables – the ones that had a “P” at the start were presumably non-default values (these included “auto-boot”, “bootdelay”, “backlight-level”, and “platform-uuid”).  The article indicated that the “false” value for “auto-boot” was the problem (and the solution to use setenv to change it, then reboot the phone).  This seemed a reasonably safe thing to do (and also easily reversed), although I imagine that it would be rather scary to a non-programmer (who has no idea what “printenv” or “setenv” might mean).

Thankfully, this worked.  The iPhone rebooted – although it went straight back to the recovery page in iTunes, which wasn’t hopeful.  However, this time the recovery process worked flawlessly (using the existing four-day-old copy of the download).  The phone was recovered from the automatic backup, and then sync’d.  Some of the settings are a bit out as you expect in a recovery, but the phone actually works, which is really all that matters.

I don’t know what would have happened if I called the “iPhone Team” (and don’t need to find out now).  I suspect that we wouldn’t have got far, or maybe would have ended up doing exactly this (or perhaps having to return the phone for service).  I could be wrong about that.  I do feel that Vodafone (specifically @vodafoneNZ) handled this pretty well (and Apple extremely badly).

How to waste $500M

I believe this was announced a while ago, but I only noticed when it was twittered today: Vodafone NZ is extending their network so that there is 900 MHz 3G coverage over much more of the country.

I was quite elated reading that – the existing coverage is is not great, and it’s annoying having a very capable phone and not being able to use it as it was meant to be (especially when overpaying).  However, after asking a few questions, it turns out this is actually bad news – the extended coverage won’t work with the world’s best phone (only PR people really dispute that).  Since they’ve just extended the network, it seems pretty unlikely that they’re planning on a real upgrade any time soon, so this means that real coverage is further off, not closer.

The release has a list of 14 phones that can be used (only 14!).  These all look very uninteresting:

• Nokia 3120.  Looks like something from 5 years ago.
• Nokia 6121.  Perhaps 7 year ago.
• Nokia 5320.  Perhaps 4 years ago.
• Nokia 5800.  
• Nokia N96.  A reasonable phone for its day – before people realised how good a phone could actually be.
• Nokia E75.  Tiny screen, and two keypads.  Crazy.
• Nokia E71.  Tiny screen, huge keyboard.  That’s the wrong way around, people.
• Nokia E63.  These Nokia’s really do all the same…
• Nokia N85.  A couple of years ago, this family of phones was pretty interesting.
• Nokia E66.  The most interesting of the Nokias.  Still nothing fascinating.
• Sony Ericsson 715.  Something not from Nokia!  I guess this might be already if you didn’t mind ugly and just wanted a pretty plain phone (but then what are you using the 3G for?).
• Sony Experia.  It uses Windows Mobile, which I think everyone can agree is a joke at this point.
• LG KS500.  Just a phone.  Ok, but boring.
• HTC Diamond II.  Most interesting looking here, but (a) is this released yet? and (b) Windows Mobile.

What about the Pre? (ok, still coming soon).  What about the Storm or Bold – or any other BlackBerry?  What about the G1 (HTC Dream)?  And yes (the one I care most about since I own one), the one that they are all trying to better, the iPhone?

It’s possible that a third generation iPhone might support 3G at 900 MHz, but as far as I can tell Europe and the US don’t really have any 900 MHz 3G networks, so I don’t know why Apple would bother.

I’m not entirely clear on what Telecom’s about-to-arrive new network is, but my guess is that it’s not going to help (I bought the iPhone outright, so could easily switch if necessary, especially now there’s number portability).

For now, looks like we’re stuck in the slow lane.  At least the iPhone can use the home network when at home – I can’t understand why anyone would get a phone that didn’t have WiFi, especially with New Zealand’s terrible data prices/plans.

The one good side: having a twitter presence is great, especially since Brislen actually responds to people with useful answers.  He does seem to be quite good at his job – I wish this could be said about everyone at Vodafone!

Vodafone subsumes ihug: can’t handle Internet or phone

Vodafone, who I used to think was an ok company, bought and then subsumed ihug, who once was a good company (but had previously sunk to terrible depths). Ihug did all sorts of nutty side ventures, but generally was a company specialising in Internet access and phone calls.

I called Vodafone yesterday, and got a “sorry, we are experiencing high call volume. Please call back” message. And then it hung up! No queue, no way to set up a call from Vodafone back to me to help. Just hanging up on me.

Today, I go to the Vodafone website (because it appears that their DNS servers are dead; thank goodness for OpenDNS) and I get:

Vodafone

If an ISP can’t handle serving up their own homepage, are they really a good choice? If you’re a business, would you even consider talking to them at this point?

iPhone works fine on prepay

The Vodafone NZ website clearly states that the iPhone (3G) will not be “available” on Prepay.  For various reasons, I swapped the SIMs in my prepay Vodafone phone and our on-contract 3G iPhone last night.  The iPhone worked without any problems at all with the Prepay SIM.

Phone calls and SMS worked fine, as did (as you would expect) all the non-phone features of the phone.  I didn’t sync the phone, so it’s possible it’s disabled there, but that would be easy enough to work around if you had two SIMs as we do (and I doubt it actually is disabled there anyway).  I didn’t try getting data (no plans are available for any Prepay customer, but the casual data is available) since we’re in a non-3G area, but I expect that also works.

Possibly by “available”, they mean “available to buy” – i.e. unless you have a contact with them they won’t sell you one.  However, we bought ours outright and they didn’t even get my phone number IIRC, so they had no idea if I had a contract or not.

I guess they want to sell more contracts, but being honest wouldn’t really hurt that much, would it?  They might even sell more phones, although maybe they don’t make much from that (I’m much more likely to get one if I can stick with my Prepay access).

Hardly news, but: Vodafone NZ sucks

They finally (hard to believe they waited this long) released their iPhone plans (the website is barely up at the moment – they own the second largest ISP in NZ, and can’t handle a bit of load!).

I knew that the data would be expensive here, although I had a little hope when I saw the costs in Australia.  This is much worse than I thought it would be, though.  Are people really going to pay $250 per month?!?  I guess so, but you’re excluding vast numbers of people that would be otherwise interested in this month.

My guess is that the cost is indirectly Apple’s fault.  At the WWDC keynote, Jobs pointed out that the cost around the world would be as low as (or lower than) the new US price – no doubt Apple enforces this in their contracts with the providers.  Vodafone NZ doesn’t want to sell the phone for $199, but has to, so simply raises the contract price until they get what they want out of it anyway.

This is twice as expensive as the US or even the complaining Canadians.  And we have a reasonably decent 3G network, so the phone would have been useful here.

The “250” plan costs $2,619 for 24 months.  For that, you get the phone, 120 minutes, 600 txts, and 250MB of data a month.  I’d pay that, but 120 minutes isn’t enough (we used about 200 minutes last month), and 600 txts are barely enough (580 last month).  It’s the data that breaks the deal – 250MB is about 8MB a day.  IOW, barely enough to check email and use the map occasionally.  My Zabbix status page is about 3MB.  I could check it twice a day.  Ridiculous.

The “500” plan costs $3719 for 24 months, and gives you the phone, 250 minutes, 600 txts, and 500MB of data a month (16MB a day).  Perhaps enough data to use the phone as long as you were really careful and around accessible wifi a lot.  But that’s a big jump in price.

The “1GB” plan (I can’t believe that’s the largest!) costs a whopping $6349 for 24 months (3 and a third brand new iMacs!).  600 minutes, 600 txts, and 1GB of data (32MB a day).  Too many minutes, and still not enough data, although it’d be useable.  But $250 per month?  There’s no way that I can justify spending that, even as a business expense (I would be using it to check the status of servers while out).

A 2GB plan (paying the overage cost) costs $7069 for 24 months.  600 minutes, 600 txts, 2GB for $280 per month.

The other option is to stick with our current plan and add a data pack.  We currently get 60 minutes, 600 txts and also have three “best mates” (unlimited txts, pxts and calls) for $46/month.

With the 200MB data plan added, the cost is $2950.75 for 24 months.  That’s only just more expensive than the iPhone 250 plan, and would suit us much better (the best mates make all the difference).  The difference between 8MB of data a day and 6.45MB of data a day is the difference between barely using the data and barely using the data.

With the 1GB data plan added, the cost is $3430.75 for 24 months.  Less than the iPhone 500 plan!  Twice the data for less money!  What are they thinking?  More importantly, what are the suckers that sign up for this thinking?  Sure you get 120 minutes with the iPhone plan, but we have three best mates that account for vastly more than 60 minutes of call time.  Given that most of the calls and a large proportion of our txts are to those three people, we get better value for exactly the same usage for close to half the price.

So: is it worth another $50 per month (and $1129 upfront) to have the iPhone?  That’s a large chunk of money.  It’s a great device, and we absolutely would use the GPS/mapping/data functionality that our iPod touch lacks.  Lots of thinking in the next couple of days!

A final note: the iPhone itself is $1129, the iPod Touch is $449.  $680 for GPS, calls, txts, and (for lots more money) data while not connected to wifi.  Pretty steep.