RjSteinert.com

Now that my JetBlue All You Can Jet pass is over and I'm settled in Portland, I no longer completely depend on my iPhone for survival and figured it was a safe time to walk the risky road of upgrading my iPhone from 3.01 to 3.1.

The result:

I did a little research on the problem and found other people having similar troubles with my application stack. Here's my relevant config:

Base OS: Linux Ubuntu 9.10 Virtualization Suite: VirtualBox 2.2.4 Guest (VM) OS: Windows XP iTunes: 8.x(?) and then upgraded to 9.04 for a second go around

The most promising info I found was on the VirtualBox.org forum in a post titled Success installing iPhone 3.0 in VM.

"My solution was to shutdown the VM (while my iphone was essentially bricked from being interrupted mid-update), change the USB filter to only match the Apple Vendor ID (thus not caring what specific Apple device it saw), and start the VM up again. It then detected the phone and did a full recovery, restore, and sync to bring the iPhone back to working condition again (it took a hour or so to do this)."

This made a lot of sense to me because on my first go around I found I had not set up a filter at all and was simply manually pointing the iPhone back to the VM everytime it restarted. This first go around let to a 1604 error.

So armed with this knowledge I upgraded my iTunes to 9.04 for good measure and set up a filter.

This filter was successful in capturing the iPhone on it's way back to life but it the process quite at the same point in installation, this time giving a 1611 error.

I then looked up the local Apple Store phone number, borrowed my house mate's phone (thanks Kendra!) and gave them a call. I ended up in some sort of iPhone support area where the support technician was surprised I was in Portland. Unfortunately support wasn't very knowledgable about the iPhone and we had to follow a script that involved me making a new user account on XP and trying to run the upgrade from that new account. Unfortunately it resulted in the same error and the technician set me up with an appointment at my local store day after tomorrow.

I'm no rookie to tech problems so I'm don't really blame Apple for screwing this up. But I am plain tired of Apple's closed source, closed minded, closed gated community and am looking into other options. This philosophy of closed door tactics and bullying of developers has created an environment that leaves too many people out in the cold. It is your typical average joe getting hit by the big corporation bus and having no rights syndrome. The mobile operating system Android, created by Google, is pretty promising. It's been released as Open Source! Of all companies, Motorola has a promising phone coming out soon called Droid that will run Google Android.