My Dead iPhone 3G S

The Internet is saturated with both the successes and failures of the iPhone 3G S launch along with the reports of disappointed customers who can’t activate their iPhones (and the retaliatory AT&T bashing as a result).  If I read the news right, people could potentially be without a phone for up to 48 hours.  Ouch.

My new iPhone 3G S does not function either, but not because of activation problems.  My iPhone is stuck in ‘Recovery Mode’ – a mode in which iTunes will be able to see and send a firmware package to the iPhone to make it work again.

How did that happen?  Well it’s a odd story.

On Friday afternoon, my Dad picked up the iPhone while I was en route to his house.  Because I wasn’t there to activate the phone, the AT&T employee let him take the phone with him and have it activated over the phone when I get there.  When I arrived, I switched my SIM card from my old iPhone into the 3G S (don’t worry, I had previously owned a 3G phone before my iPhone, so I had a 3G SIM), and the activation took mere minutes.  The iPhone (and all of it’s advertised features) worked flawlessly, but there were little snags here and there:

• Battery life was horrible.  In 20 minutes, my battery was reduced to around 75% (at least the icon said so).  After an hour two of playing with the iPhone, the battery was down to 50%.
• Email and Voice-mail password rejection.  My Voice-mail password was not accepted, even after I rest it through AT&T’s website.  I had to delete and re-add two of my four email accounts (MobileMe and Exchange).  Even with the correct settings, the iPhone couldn’t save the passwords; instead, it would ask for the password for both accounts every 30 or so seconds, and then follow up with asking for the Voice-mail password again.
• YouTube support on 3G S was flaky.  By flaky I mean that I could shoot a video, edit, and publish to YouTube straight from my phone, but if I tried to watch it on my iPhone after it was published, I was given a compatibility error.  Although I think this problem has been rectified (and was mainly due to my ignorance on how YouTube works), I still thought it kind of odd.

Anyway, regardless of the quirks, I was still happy.  I went to bed Saturday night with the battery at 50%, wondering if would drain due to the odd power leak I’d been experiencing.  It did.  It did so much, that it took 20 minutes for the phone to acquire enough power from the USB adapter to start.

When it started, I was greeted with a screen that said “There is no SIM card detected”, followed by another prompt that listed both my IMEI and ICCID numbers as “unknown”.  A quick Google search, and it appears that it’s a relatively common problem with the iPhone 3G that can be fixed by simply restoring the iPhone.  Awesome.  I put the iPhone into ‘Recovery Mode’ (as mentioned earlier), and ran a restore.

I realize now that it was a mistake.

Even now, the phone sits in Recovery Mode.  When a restore is run, iTunes gives an error code of “1013″ which is the error code associated with trying to downgrade your firmware (ie: downgrade from 3.0 beta 3 to 2.2.1).  For the 3G S, it’s pretty much the kiss of death, for there is no lesser firmware that can be installed onto it in hopes clearing out faulty 3.0 code.

I’ve taken my iPhone to AT&T (who, of course, pointed me to Apple) and contacted Apple Care (which my experience with this issue is worthy of another post instead of including it here), to come to the conclusion that the iPhone simple needs replacing.  Great.

I’ve given the details of my 3G S problem the my friend Steve, the host of The Tech Buzz, and I’ve been Googling the issue every now and then to see if someone else has written anything else about it; so far, it seems to be a pretty unique problem.

As of now, I have a Genius Bar appointment.  If anyone has experienced this and overcome it, I’d love to hear from you.  Please feel free to send me an email – until then, I’ll still be using my trusty iPhone v1.

UPDATE:

I went to my Genius Bar appointment and my phone was replaced in under two minutes.  The Genius checked for water damage and then replaced the phone.  As far as I can tell, it’s fully working (and the battery life is long, too!) and can be used normally.  But again, the phone is sort of acting quirky – check it out:

When I tried to reinstall these apps, the iPhone froze up and I had to do a restart.  Great.  Just great.

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