I began my journey--my long journey--to iPhone 2.0 by first upgrading from 1.1.3 to 1.1.4. That seemed to go smoothly. I had recently upgraded iTunes to 7.7 and it had backed up my phone, so because iTunes recognized that the phone was connected to it I felt confident enough to simply wipe the phone and restore it from a backup. It then came back with no trouble. Now, I thought, time to install 2.0. Trouble was, although iTunes recognized that the 2.0 software was available, it would not install it. When I clicked the Upgrade button, iTunes would take forever trying to contact the server. After waiting about 15 minutes, I clicked the cancel button and then iTunes told me that I needed version 7.7 to install the 2.0 iPhone software. Hmmm. I already had 7.7.

After some research, it appeared that many people had a problem connecting to Apple's servers and a few people even had the problem I had. One suggestion was to create a new network Location in System Preferences, because (so the speculation went) your current configuration was looking in the wrong place for Apple's servers. It sounded like some kind of DNS problem, or perhaps a default configuration file that had the wrong domain name or IP address in it.

So, given that problem, I directly downloaded the 2.0 firmware file from an Akamai server (on appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iPhone), shift-clicked the Restore button, and selected that download file. Whereupon I found that MacOS had helpfully dearchived the ipsw file and deleted the original. So I used wget to grab the archive, and it seemed to install 2.0, but the phone refused to return to life. It was stuck asking me to plug it in to iTunes... but it was plugged in. I plugged and unplugged it, restarted iTunes, restarted the Mac. All to no avail. I eventually cleared that little problem by restoring the phone to an older backup, downloading iTunes 7.7 AGAIN and installing it AGAIN, and then rebooting once or maybe twice. iTunes then realized that it really was version 7.7, it downloaded the firmware package by itself, installed it, and the phone came back. My only guess is that the iTunes reinstall overwrote some bad bit or data or errant config file somewhere.

It certainly took a long time to reinstall though, because I had to do a complete wipe and ittook a long while to transfer 7.5GB of music and podcasts and photos and videos. But eventually I was up and running with 2.0. It was certainly worth the effort, too. I have so far installed 1Password, eBay, Light, Labyrinth LE, Shazam, Moonlight Mahjong, PayPal, Tap Tap, Apple's Remote, Scribble, Dice Bag, Pandora, Molecules, myLite, Aurora Feint, Urbanspoon, Bloomberg, Nearby, Shakespeare, WritingPad, PhoneSaber, Cube Runner, and midomi. No doubt I will be deleting some of these eventually, but I remember this phase of exploration when I first got a PalmOS device and I downloaded things I didn't really want but seemed interesting. And like the early days of PalmOS, a number of the apps now flooding onto the market sort of make me think, "They want $4.99 for that?" So far I haven't bought any applications, not even Super Monkey Ball, but I'm sure I will. I'm just waiting a little while to see what comes out (and as the rest of the family have been in Japan for the last few weeks, I haven't gotten any pressure to buy any of the games now out!). At this stage of iPhone development, many of the apps, especially games, use the more novel aspects of the technology. We have tilt games and touch games, but the problem with tilt and touch is that the former reduces the amount of screen you can see, and the latter hides part of it completely. Sometimes it doesn't matter, as in Moonlight Mahjong (not actually Mahjong, though). But for games like the various Air Hockey versions, using the finger can get a little tricky. I just don't see myself spending even US$0.99 on one. Maybe if I was a huge airhockey fan.

One application that I consider critical is 1Password. Although I installed it on my Mac a long time ago, I only bought it relatively recently. Now I am making full use of it, and the iPhone version is excellent. It wirelessly syncs your keychain in much the same way that iTunes permits remote control, by displaying a number on the iPhone which you type into a window belonging to the 1Password application. The 1Password developers have tips on sync problems on agilewebsolutions.com, and there do seem to be some challenges with it. I had to turn off my firewall for the desktop app to get the request from the iPhone, but once I did that it synced quickly. 1Password on the iPhone has its own browser, and handles logins seamlessly. It offers a full two-way sync, too, so changes on either machine will be updated on the other, but I found a lot of "Conflict Copy" keys on both machines after my second sync between the two. Considering that I have over 300 keys and lots I no longer use, I really should have cleaned that up before I sync'd. I will, and will then delete 1Password from the iPhone, sync to install it again, and then sync the keychain.

Another great app: Shazam. Just run it with some music playing (TV, radio, whatever) and it will listen for a few seconds, analyze it, and tell you what it is. midomi is another app like it. I don't know how they do it, but they seem like magic to me.

A peculiar thing recently happened to my iPhone, a week or so after I updated to 2.0. I turned it off, and when I turned it on a couple of hours later, it presented me with an icon of the USB cable and the instruction that I should connect the phone to iTunes. That could have meant that the SIM card had lost its mind, that the machine just didn't know what it was. I shut it down and started it again and then it seemed to return to normalcy, though it displayed a dialog that it had been activated on the phone network. I soon discovered that all my third-party apps would not run. They appeared to start, perhaps displaying a loading screen, and then they would crash-to-Springboard (the iPhone's Finder equivalent). I synced and most of the applications worked, but Remote and PhoneSaber did not. I deleted Remote and sync'd again, and it worked. I didn't delete PhoneSaber but the sync also fixed that too. Not sure what was going on there. I suppose it is possible that the SIM card had become dislodged or a random cosmic ray had knocked some bit from 1 to 0 somewhere deep inside its solid state memory, but it was a bit of a shock. I wonder if my phone has a physical problem.