tonyballinger.com

I resisted the temptation for a while, but the urge to dink with the iPhone just became too much to resist. Particularly because I have a collection of Brian Eno ringtones from the Nokia 8800 that I’m fond of using. They’re not particularly great as ringtones actually, since they have the same sense of immediacy as the rest of Eno’s work (meaning: none). However, they’re very nice as subtle alarms. For example, if you have an alarm set to go off during your work day, or you’re looking for an alarm to wake you from a Sunday afternoon nap.

So I downloaded iFuntastic last night, and got started messing with my phone. I had some reservations as my phone was rebooting and being altered by the application, but I figured if anything went horribly wrong I could just do a full restore. The process went without a hitch, and in no time I had a collection of elegantly ambient ringtones loaded up on my iPhone. I even set one to subtly remind me when it was time to get on the road to work this morning.

Trouble didn’t start until Apple rolled about the iPhone 1.0.2 update this evening. Like a fool, I decided to install the update on my phone right before leaving work. The update quickly went south, and put my iPhone into restore mode. At that point, the only option was to download the full 90MB software image to do a full restore. I think Apple punishes people at this point by making this file download as slowly as possible, maybe even going as far to make the download stall periodically. It took about 30 minute for the software to download, install and restore my iPhone to a healthy state.

The pickle at this point was that I have my iPhone synced to two machines. I sync my calendar and contacts from my work machine (where I use the calendar the most) and I have my music and video set to sync from my home machine. This means that once the iPhone was restored, all music and video was removed from it. Luckily I had brought my iPod to work also, so I had tunes for the ride home.

My lesson learned: it’s really not worth all this hassle for a couple of Eno ringtones. The man’s a genius, no doubt, but no ringtone is worth an evening of sweating over a full restore of an iPhone.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.