Today, my iPhone suddenly got hotter than usual and drained its battery within four hours after being fully recharged overnight. I thought nothing of it, but when I got home and tried to recharge it, a message was displayed stating I should restore the phone using iTunes.
A bit annoyed at the inevitable loss of all my data, but otherwise not worried, I went about restoring my three month old iPhone 3GS 32GB. And failed. Three times.
Every time I ran the restore it ran, slowly but surely, all the way up until the end of the progress bar on my iPhone. Only to return the message in iTunes "The iPhone 'iPhone' could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (1002)."
At first, I thought it might have something to do with the firewall. So I turned it off. But turning it off had no effect.
Then, I created a new Administrator account with a fresh copy of iTunes and unplugged all peripherals except the iPhone cable. Still no effect.
So now my iPhone is dead and I'm effectively phone-less, sad, and sorry I bought a phone that lasts for three months with a two year contract. I'll take it to the T-Mobile store tomorrow where I fully expect to be charged €50 for them to tell me they can't help me either.
Up until now, I was such an Apple fan-boy my cognitive dissonance took care of issues like flaky connectivity and short battery life. But now the phone has stopped working altogether it finally dawns on me: the iPhone is a beautiful wanna-have piece of technology that sucks. Big time.
And I still have to pay for it for another 21 months... Yay!
