14 DAY TRIAL // A flurry of negative threads can be spotted on Apple’s Discussions forums, with numerous iPhone users complaining about multiple issues with the iOS 4 update, including the upgrade process itself. Customers are losing their contacts, photos appear blurry, the update to iOS 4 never installs and shows up errors, and many more. It seems iPhone 3G owners are mostly affected.
In a post to the Apple Discussions forums, iPhone 3G user bbetts writes, “I fear my contacts are gone. Neither of the last 2 backups which iTunes took have any contacts in them (down from well over 100) - that's a backup before and after the update to iOS4.” “I have no other app that I sync with and no other backups available to me. So now I have a 3G iPhone which is completely useless to me as a phone. Time to go on the warpath and complain to everyone in existence…,” the author of the post concludes.
On the topic of iPhone freezing during iOS 4 update, JDNATL writes, “Finally downloaded the new iOS last night. Installed it and it was taking forever. Went to bed, it was still froze when I woke up. Rebooted phone and iTunes, now it's stuck in restore mode. I've tried restoring it three times, keeps freezing a 1/4 way through.” Many others responded with similar stories, some being able to eventually finish the update process, others not.
Interestingly, user redshag writing in a different thread claims he too had been encountering issues with the upgrade process, and decided to swap cables. Allegedly, it was all it took to finally apply the iOS 4 update. “Was having all the same problems... I deleted the update and downloaded a new one several times... then...CHANGED TO A NEWER CABLE!!!! The cable made the difference for some reason and it worked like a champ,” redshag claims, although there’s an offset chance other factors intervened in his successful iOS 4 upgrade process.
Softpedia is curious to know how the iOS 4 upgrade process went for others. Those who own a supported device and carried out the update are encouraged to post their story in the comments, so we can draw a better picture of what is happening - which devices best support iOS 4; which desktop OSes are best suited to upgrade a device (Mac OS X, Windows); what was the device’s current state, etc. A follow-up piece will then be posted on our website, based on your comments. Fire away!
UPDATE: Our readers have spoken! See this report for a selection of some of your comments.