As you know, Apple posted iOS 4 for public consumption early Monday. The software is being hailed as the most radical overhaul to Apple’s mobile operating system, fixing over 60 vulnerabilities while adding over a hundred new features and dozens of nice-to-haves.
Upgrading to iOS 4 should be easy as a pie: you just connect your device to iTunes, click Update when prompted, and have a latte while the jukebox program is performing its magic. In the best case scenario, you’ll have an iPhone with iOS 4, your settings, data, apps, and media.
As a rule of thumb, if something goes wrong try hard-resetting your device a couple of times: Press and hold the home and sleep buttons at the same time (ignore the red slide to turn off) until the Apple logo appears.
Should your device reboot endlessly following a failed iOS 4 update, restoring it to factory settings is the only way to go. Connect the device to iTunes, select it in the source list on the left, and hit the Restore button on the Summary tab. This will re-install the latest firmware and populate your device with factory settings. As a result, you’ll have to re-sync all your apps and media, and will lose your settings, as well as your user and app data.
Of course, you can always restore your settings, user, and app data from the last backup. You did perform a manual backup prior to upgrading to iOS 4, didn’t you?
To restore the device from the backup file, right-click your device in the iTunes’ source list on the left and choose “Restore from Backup” from a drop-down menu. This will copy over user and app data and settings from the backup file to your device.
Sometimes, your iPhone will be such a mess that iTunes won’t recognize it at all. When this happens, put the device in the recovery mode, denoted by the “connect to iTunes” graphic on its display. If that doesn’t help, connect the device to another USB port, reinstall iTunes 9.2, or run iTunes from another user account on your computer.
None of the aforementioned tips will help resolve the unusual glitches like MMS and push notifications no longer functioning, blurry photos synced from iPhoto, and auto-lock defaulting to one minute without the option of changing the timing. There was no information on solving those issues at press time.
Some users complain that iTunes didn’t restore their contacts from the backup upon installing iOS 4. If you’re syncing your contacts with the MobileMe or Google cloud, you should know that Google Sync underwent maintenance on Monday afternoon that caused issues with mobile syncing. You should leave the Contacts app open for a while so it can retrieve your address book from the cloud.
The same goes for calendars and bookmarks in the Calendar and Safari apps, respectively. If that doesn’t help, try turning contacts syncing off and back on in the Mail, Contacts, Calendar section of your iPhone’s Settings. Those syncing their iPhone contacts the old-fashioned way – with a computer via iTunes – are advised to back up their desktop address book regularly.
One of the most common complaints deals with iTunes backups taking a long time to complete. An iTunes backup includes your bookmarks, contacts, notes, voice memos, call history, SMS and MMS messages, calendars, wallpapers, call history, network settings, keychain passwords, in addition to the photos, screenshots, and videos taken on the device and application settings, preferences, in-app purchases, and app data. Backup times depend on the amount of those items accumulated on your device over time.
The easiest way to cut down the backup time is to move all the photos and videos from your camera roll to your computer. Connect the device to your computer
and wait until it appears as an external drive on the system. Navigate to the sub-folders inside the DCIM folder on your device (that’s your camera roll) and move all the files to a folder on your computer.
You can decrease backup times further by turning off encryption: Click your device in the source list on the left and un-check the Encrypt iTunes Backup box on the Summary tab.
