Various Problems with iPhone 2.0 and MobileMe
2008-07-12 10:24:24
Here are some of the issues I ran into upgrading my iPhone to 2.0 and switching .Mac to MobileMe.
There are 4 Macs that I work on: two desktop iMacs at home, one Mac Pro at work and my MacBook. The main reason I have always had .Mac and the main reason I will use MobileMe is so I can sync contacts between them. All the Macs I have got the OS patch to switch .Mac to MobileMe except for one of the iMacs at home. No matter what I did, Software Update said there were no new updates. Usually, patches are available on the Apple downloads site, but for some reason MobileMe was not.
The reason I cared about this was that on the Mac I was using (my Mac Pro at work) kept complaining of sync conflicts every 15 minutes. Furthermore, it decided it should delete a bunch of random contacts. I suspect that there was some incompatibility between the .Mac sync protocol of the rogue iMac at home and MobileMe protocols. Eventually, I managed to find a MobileMe patch package file on a local Software Update server. We'll see if that clears up the problems.
Another problem I had was of my own doing: I upgraded to an early version of firmware for iPhone 2.0. Apparently, the firmware was for 3G phones, I had to reflash with the official 2.0 firmware for old iPhones. This went pretty smoothly, except that the application "sync" erased all the apps I had downloaded to my iPhone. So I've had to redownload everything, and I'm going to have to re-enter all my settings, like flickr passwords and stuff.
I did have a number (3-4) OS crashes of the iPhone, but I'm hoping that's because I was using the wrong firmware.
MobileMe looks promising so far, but it's quite slow. Selecting a single contact takes over 20 seconds to load in the web browser. Hopefully the MobileMe folks will get a handle on performance once the initial launch problems are cleared up.