I wiped the iPhone last night. The home button has become incorrigible, even after getting air-blasted by the good folks at the University Ave Genius Bar in PA, but yesterday the Music app went completely clowner-cockwise. You’d pick a song and nothing would happen. Fast forward, reverse, nothing. So you’d pick another song, and it would immediately skip ahead to the next song – and if you tried to reverse, you’d get everything that LOOKED like the first song but the second song playing. And if you tried to fast-forward, it would skip right ahead to the third song, And it would never play more than about four tracks before stopping dead again.
So I took the final measure you can take with an iPhone: wipe it clean and set it up as new rather than restoring from backup. I took the opportunity to pare down the load on the iPhone substantially – it’s probably carrying half the apps and half the video it had earlier and there’s a good 6+ GB of free space on it now. It made for a healthy exercise in getting rid of all the stuff I feel compelled to schlep around but never actually use for anything, and we’ll see what the results are like. But so far, everything seems to be healed. Maybe the move is just to blow the phone away once a year and try to mop up afterwards.
Meanwhile, I have the work iPad doing just the reverse – I am setting it up with everything I want/need/think I need and backing up to iCloud with the idea that I will collect my new iPad from UPS a week from today and promptly restore it from said backup. This will also allow me to work on determining what apps need to move to the iPad more or less permanently (hint: Netflix, Crackle, Hulu+, GoodPlayer, etc etc).
It’s amazing in retrospect that we ever tried to do this nonsense on a 220×176 phone display. I remember looking longingly at the W600 from Sony Ericsson, that switchblade-format device with the handle-style antenna, and putting the J2ME version of Google Maps on it at the AT&T store to see how practical it was. I had Opera Mini on my old Moto V630. I tried to make do with the P800 and the Nokia 6620, in the search for something that would do Bluetooth AND speakerphone AND high-speed EDGE data AND get my email AND run rudimentary applications AND take pictures (and maybe even video). And then I took possession of my first iPhone in 2007, free of charge, and the days of phone glee were more or less brought to a screeching halt.
I just wanted to live in the future. Now I do. =)