Originally, I had wanted this to be a very positive post. I'm in the process of rebuilding my laptop and as a result needed to get iTunes up and working with my iPhone again. I thought it would be a relatively easy process. After all, everything else with the iPhone is. Not so much. Two days and three calls to Apple Support later and it's working. It appears I haven't lost any info, but I was fully confident all along the way that I would.
Since this was a voluntary reinstall, I had the opportunity to back everything up first. I backed up my music folders as well as a complete copy of my user profile to minimize the chance of losing anything. After reinstalling, I plugged my phone in and the first thing iTunes told me was "You can only sync with one computer at a time, if you sync your phone will be erased and replaced with what's in this instance of iTunes" (it's been a couple of days and I don't have the exact error message, sorry). Warning bells! So, I called Apple Support. I spoke with a very nice fellow who told me "Oh, it's really easy. Just plug it in and make a backup. That'll repopulate iTunes and you'll be good to go." Sweet! Nope, wasn't to be. I did this, but when I looked, none of the music had been put back as had none of the applications.
So, I did a little research and found information on the "Transfer Purchases" option when you right-click your phone in iTunes. It'll put any applications or music you bought from the iTunes store back from your phone. Grand! That seemed to work, but when I went to sync, I got the same dire warning that everything would be erased. Hmmmm...now, keep in mind, I use the iPhone primarily to access the Cloud. The vast majority of the data I use is out there, but I do keep some things on the phone. Most specifically pictures of my daughter, but I have data in the Notes application, Calendar, To Do, Checklist, etc. The pictures are easy enough to back up, but the others aren't. It wouldn't be the end of the world to lose some of this data, but I figured it could wait until the morning when I had a chance to talk to Apple Support again.
The second tech was just as nice, but easily one of the most clueless people I'd ever spoken to. I had to explain that a monitor going into power save was not the same thing as the computer going to sleep. She even told me that if I didn't check the boxes that said "Sync Music" or "Sync Applications" that it would still do so. Apparently, in her mind, checking those boxes meant to do some kind of SPECIAL sync that erases everything and starts over. As long as you pushed the Sync button on the Summary tab, it'll sync everything everytime regardless of what you told it to sync. I got off the phone with her, tried a few things and decided to try my luck again with Support...third time being the charmed one and all. This last tech did have a clue, but was completely unable to help me as well. In the end, I finally had to just give up and tell iTunes to go ahead and do whatever it planned to do and if I lost data, I lost data. It looks like I didn't (although I did have to relogin to every app that stored one like Facebook and Linkedin), but the experience has really soured me.
It really shouldn't be this hard. The iPhone is about ease of use and convenience, and this experience didn't match that. I never told the techs I'd done a manual reinstall as I wanted to avoid the "Oh, of course you reinstalled...you're on Windows" rhetoric. I told them I'd had a hard drive crash as I figured there must be some kind of procedure available to deal with that situation. Apparently, though, I'm the first person out of the millions of iPhone users that had a hard drive crash and had to restore. One of the techs simply shrugged it off "I think most people will just reinstall and not bother to try to keep their data". Yes, most of the drones who bought the iPhone solely because it has an Apple on the back won't care. I also acknowledge that perhaps I got a little overanxious about the situation. But when I have error messages that specifically state "you WILL lose everything on your phone", I can only take those at face value. Compound that with a string of support techs that don't even have the faintest idea of how the software works and what am I supposed to think?
At my workplace, my team supports the messaging environment and therefore has a hand in supporting the mobile workforce. When management came to us and asked to validate the iPhone with our Exchange environment, the team came back with a "No" because it couldn't be reliably and consistently wiped in the case of a theft or loss. If Apple wants the iPhone to compete seriously in the business use marketplace, it's going to need to understand that this kind of laissez faire attitude towards people's data doesn't apply in business. They've spent the last couple of decades complaining that Microsoft makes inferior products and have used their size to "bully" other people out of the marketplace, but these experiences prove to me that Apple's failings are completely due to their own misunderstanding that the needs of business users differ significantly from the needs of home users.
In the end, though, I still love my iPhone. I'm just glad it's only for personal use.
Just a small side note on the information above. Remotely wiping the iPhone works correctly as long as the secutrity policies are pushed down to the phone correctly. The iPhone still has some drawbacks in the security department because:a) It does not recognize all security options. Especially those pushed by Exchange 2007.b) All applications are run as root. This allows any malitious app to own the phone. Andc) Jailbreaking is still possible.Other than the security concerns, the main drawback to the iPhone in an enterprise is the fact that iTunes is required to activate and backup the phone. I think everyone knows that iTunes is not an enterprise ready application. Without pushing iTunes out to the users, how would they be able to apply the once-per-month OS reload on the phone. Apple really needs to make patches available that do not require the entire OS to be reloaded. And while we are talking about patches, how about telling us what is included and what was fixed in a release?I am not inpressed with the iPhone. It was a good first attempt, but it still has a long way to go to be an enterprise ready phone. It took Microsoft five major releases to get there with Windows Mobile. I think Apple will get there in three.
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