On Thursday I had trouble answering a call. By Friday night it was clear my iPhone was seriously porked. A visit to the nearby Apple store got me a swift replacement, and a promise that once I synchronized the new device it’d have all the info the old one did.
Hrm.
Well, the Mac Genius did ask if I had any photos I hadn’t offloaded, as those would be lost in the swap. But, as it turns out, there’s a lot of info that gets lost when an iPhone is either swapped or gets a firmware reset (my phone first got the reset, then when symptoms persisted, replaced).
Things that should be simple to back up on an iPhone, like contacts in the favorites list aren’t, same for special ring tones I’d set for various contacts and they were all lost even after the restore. It may be less surprising that various settings and preferences, the default ringtone or whether to sound an alert when new email arrives, are lost. Those are fairly easy to reset, but a real shock to me was that any data in the notes application is lost. And, unfortunately, I’d started to keep a lot of info in there. Everything from ideas I wanted to followup to trivia that, well, like any trivia, just couldn’t be filed elsewhere.
The loss of those notes was a painful surprise, and a reminder how delicate my digital world is.
Then, while enjoying the iPhone as a diversion between flights in PHX, I realized that my browser cookies weren’t backed up. Cookies aren’t expected to be persistent, not even by me, but it was just another thing and a reminder of my frustration that the iPhone doesn’t save website passwords the way big-screen Safari does (though some websites leverage cookies to make it less troublesome, but when cookies aren’t sync’d…).
That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on my iPhone (so don’t ask if you can have mine). Some of this is part of the bargain early adopters take on, but I also expect these issues will be addressed in software soon.
Extra: oddly, the replacement iPhone was retail boxed, and this receipt is very different from how I’ve seen them handle repairs/replacements of Mac products. The best part is the receipt shows my warranty was extended a few weeks.
[tags]iphone, complaints, early adopter, replacement, reset, lost data[/tags]