my iPhone unbricking experience
Note: I’ve done everything legit, no jailbreak attempt.
So, yesterday I noticed that some of my apps have updates, so I updated them on my Macbook and when that didn’t work for all of them, I then after a sync, tried updating directly on my iPhone. At this point I saw two copies of Here I Am (the one with the icon of a pinpoint, not that of the envelope) appear. [Side note: weird there are two different apps in the App Store with the same name!] One as the app and one as the update. When the update was finished, I then noticed my phone was bricked. Reset, waited about 10 minutes and just saw the apple logo.
So, after watching The Chris Pirillo Show in which he unbricks an iPhone, I followed the same procedure myself. Hold down the home and sleep buttons while it restarts and then restarts again. Then restore from backup in iTunes. After 3 hours, it finally restored itself. Note that a half hour was downloading the iPhone OS 2.0 (255 MB). After that, I just had to sync and it loaded all my music, photos and apps and I was set to go.
Later, I was pushing my iPhone a bit more to its limits by surfing 6 websites at the same time and then I downloaded the Netshare app and opened the App Store on my iPhone while it was installing. Well, this bricked it the second time in the day. So, I was going to sleep, so I set it to restore my iPhone overnight. When I woke up I saw the iPhone worked perfectly, but iTunes couldn’t sync, instead it gave me the two options again, Restore or Set up new iPhone. Well, it’s not a new iPhone, so I chose restore, and let it sit another couple of hours.
When I came back to check up on it, I noticed the progress bar was frozen in the middle and both my iPhone and laptop were pretty hot, so after waiting 15 more minutes with no more progress, I shut them both down and when I came back after the cooldown, I found my iPhone works. …even though I shut it down in the middle of the restore! WTF!? Then after a sync, I have all my stuff back on except for a few apps which I hope will come back on the next sync. One paid app Metasquares didn’t get on though, which is frustrating, but I’ll live. Main thing is it works again.
So, lesson learned. When playing with cutting edge tech, be gentle. Also, the iPhone isn’t a multi-tasking device. I should let it finish one thing before starting another and don’t open too many web browser windows.
Update: I finally realized that it’s just too unstable now and decided for a complete re-install of the iPhone OS which will lose all my settings, saved passwords, etc. I’m really fed up, but this should, at least, fix the issue completely.