Resetting the iPhone

So only 2 weeks in with my brand new 3GS and already I've have cause to reset the iPhone. It was locking up and being unresponsive, so a reset was called for. I had no clue how to do this so I went to the shop. The instructional PDF for the iPhone lists 2 or 3 ways to restart an iPhone, but it is not at all clear about whether there will be data loss or any other implication for any or each of the methods. So, here it is all spelled out for future reference.

1. An app on my iPhone has locked up and frozen the iPhone, how do I restart it?

This is easy and safe, hold the sleep/wake button on the top of the iPhone for a few seconds. A red slider bar "Slide to Power Off" appears. Either slide the bar to power your iPhone off, or if you are not comfortable at that point, just click the cancel button at the bottom. To restart your iPhone you should now press and hold the sleep/wake button until the apple icon appears (about 5 seconds).

I have found that this can resolve slow start up times, if you get a delay before the slider screen appears at startup.

2. My iPhone is locking up or freezing frequently, takes a few seconds to start up, or is freezing when I press any of the buttons.

This is going to need a reset. There are two ways to do this. Hold the sleep/wake button as described above until the red slider appears, move the slider, then press and hold the Home button at the bottom of the iPhone until the apple logo appears.

If that does not work, you can reset your iPhone to factory settings WITHOUT any data loss by using the following method; Press and hold BOTH the home button and the sleep/wake button until the apple logo apeears (about 10 seconds). This should reset your iPhone and your contacts and apps should still be intact.

3. I've tried all of the above and my iPhone is still freezing.

This is the big daddy of resets, and will restore all software, preferences and settings to the factory defaults. You'll need to try and do a sync with iTunes first if you can in order to backup your data. Once you have done that in iTunes select the Summary tab then the Restore option, with your iPhone connected. Remember this will WIPE all your data from the iPhone, proceed with caution.

You can read more about resetting, restoring and backing up your iPhone on the apple support page here.

Day 5

Still adding Palm contacts to my iPhone via speadsheets/CSV/Outlook, but what I did achieve today was e-mail!

Email on the iPhone

I'd tried before and failed to connect to the IMAP server, tonight I figured out the problem. Yep, I was entering the wrong password for my googlemail account! Now I have that sorted, I can easily log into my googlemail while on the move. A quick test showed that any deletions etc I make on the iPhone are mirrored completely on the webmail so when I log in on a PC everything is as it should be.

I just need to check on push e-mail and if/how that works now.

Day 4 - Palm Contacts in iPhone!

So over the lastfew days I figured out how to get my Palm contacts into my new iPhone. There are a lot of steps involved, although the final effect is very neat if done carefully, so it's worth it.

The alternative is to manually add every contact you have right there on your new iPhone, but that is a big job, and has huge scope for user error.

So here's how to transfer Palm contacts from Palm Desktop into an iPhone.

You are going to need

a) Palm Desktop
b) A spreadsheet (Excel or OpenOffice)
c) Outlook or Outlook Express

1. Export from Palm Desktop as a comma seperated CSV file.

2. Open in a spreadsheet and start correcting any errors and soing some basic admin on your contact list. To make this easier, I created sepearte worksheets for each group, this makes things far more managable. For example, I had seperate sheets for Friends, Family, Business etc. Once you are done you should have a nice spreadsheet with a bunch of rows containing contacts.

In order to make the next step easy, you want to assign a header row with the following exact titles.

First Name
Last Name
Home Phone
Mobile Phone
Home street
Home City
Home state
Home Postal Code
Notes

It is a good idea to save this as an xls file now, as a backup.

The format we need for the next step though is CSV, so "Save As" a comma separated text CSV file. If you see an options or settings box, select it and make sure that Text Delimeter is BLANK and field Delimiter is a comma.

3. Now open up Outlook or Outlook Express and go to Address book and select Import. Find the CSV file and import it. Your Palm contacts will now be in your Address book.

The difficulty now is, that your neatly prepared Palm contacts and all mixed in with your Outlook contacts.

To make them easily identifiable do a simple trick in the previous step. Outlook Express lets you sort your address by by clicking on a column heading, the problem is there are only 3, Name, email address, Business Phone and Home Phone. Select one of those that is not being used by any of your contacts, for example Business Phone, and in your spreadsheet fill those fields with something like "111111".

Now when you open up the CSV in Outlook, you can click on the Column heading for Business Phone and right away all your Palm contacts you just transferred will appear nicely grouped together. All you need to do now is create a Group, i.e. "Friends", then highlight all those "11111" contacts and drag them into that new group.

4. Start up iTunes and in the Info tab, select the Contacts section and tick the box for "Friends" to have only those new contacts sunched to your iPhone.

Sounds like a lot of work when it's spelled out, and I guess it really is, mostly depennding on how tidy your Palm Contacts database is. Mine was a mess, with Home and Business addresses mixed up etc, so it is taking me days to do. However at the end of it, you will have a nice spreadsheet to keep as a backup of all your current contacts, and your iPhone will have a perfect list of contacts, all in their own Groups!

Day 1 !

Okay so after de-boxing the iPhone from it's rather cool looking uhm, "coffin", the first port of call with any new gadget - the battery advise.

Usually with a new gadget you need to give it a good full charge before you use it, or else you don't achieve full battery power. There's a technical name for it, but basically, always fully charge a new device. Best thing to do though is check the instructions.

With the iPhone, there were NO charging instructions in the box. A quick browse on th web took me to an apple support page that explained the type of battery in the iPhone does not reuqire a full charge to operate, so no worries there - a quick charge for say an hour or two then down to business.

The order of the day was something like (in no particular order)

1. Play an mp3
2. Play a podcast
3. Add/Import contacts
4. Browse the web
5. Play a video podcast
6. Send a text message
7. Make a phone call

Not a lot to expect from a high end phone!

Before I start on that list, one thing that I already miss is Palm Desktop. Apparantly there is no equivalent PC application for the iPhone. I am so used to opening Palm Desktop on my PC to do quick conatct edits, or check the calender that I really feel like I lost one of my limbs, or at least a digit. That is going to take some getting used too... anyway...

1. Play an mp3

To play an mp3, I first had to go though the whole itunes thing, which raised the first issue, and one that is all over Google so I am not alone.

Issue 1. Using itunes on one PC with more than one itunes user and more than one device.

By this I mean a husband and wife both having an "i device" (ie. my iPhone and her iPod shuffle) and each having an itunes account.

Opening an account each was no big problem, but now it means when either of us open up itunes, we have to log the other personout, and then log into our own account. Bit of a messy pain.

The best solution I have seen so far is to use seperate User Accounts in windows. That is something I have refrained from doing for years, so having to do it now just for the sake of itunes doesn't sit well with me. I'll wait and see if there is a better solution to be found.

Anyway, once logged into itunes I transferred an mp3 to the iPhone using drag and drop. Easy enough. I will need to get my head around playlists though, otherwise this is gonna be a mess of files.

Playback through the iPhone speaker was "okay". I'd say it was better then the Treo 680, but not as good as the Nokia 5800 Music Express. I have not tried the headphones yet.

2. Play a Podcast

I like video podcasts. On the Treo 680 it was a bit of a non-starter. On either a creative zen or a PSP it was awesome. Thanks to RSS feeds, downloading and synching video podcasts was almost a joyous task.

Looking to the iPhone for some conergance, I am really hoping it can perform as well as either the PSP or the Creative Zen on this front. So far, not so good though.....

I used itunes to download an episode of The Totally Rad show from Revision3. Turn out it was a pigging huge file, almost a gigabyte. It download pretty quick though, so then I dragged it to the iPhone in the same manner as I did with the mp3.

Then I got an error message along the lines of "cannot transfer ans this file is not compaitble with the device"

WTF?

I just downloaded a podcast from iTunes, and it won't play on an iPhone?

I am still bewildered at this one, so issue number 2 is...

Issue 2. How to synch podcasts (and use RSS feeds) onto the iPhone?

The rest of the list is going to spill over to tomorrow, so I'll jump to a quick one...

6. Send a Text Message

Sending the text was easy, the on screen keyboard is pretty good, even used portrait where it is slightly narrower than landscape obviously.

There is, surprise surprise an issue though.

Issue 3. Why is the onscreen keyboard ALWAYS shown as capital letters, regardless of whether shift is pressed or not?

That is plain bizarre and I hope a stupidly simple and sensible answer will arrive shortly...

That's enough for today, although I might fight with a contacts CSV file later on...

iPhone Convert

No, not a blog about converting various file formats for the iPhone, but a blog about how a long (long) time Palm user ditched his Treo 680 and converted to iPhone, on 3GS launch day.

Whether or not I will actually be an iPhone convert, singing its praises and lambasting Palms devices remains to be seen, but day by day I'll be recording the joys and pains of joining the iPhone brigade.

This is Day 1, and already I am finding the switch difficult. But that's not for this short introduction, that is for the next post ....