iPhone not appearing in iTunes (error 18)

I’ve had a few issues with the phone today: namely the thing isn’t being recognised by iTunes, plus my music and videos have mysteriously disappeared from the iPhone itself.

Upon trying to restore the iPhone from a backup in iTunes I got the dreaded message:

The iPhone “iPhone” could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (-18)

Luckily after a bit of jiggery-pokery I managed to get it functioning as normal with all data and settings restored following these steps:

• On the iPhone, go into Settings > General and do a full delete of settings and data
• Hard-reset the iPhone by holding the power key and the home key until the Apple logo appears
• Plug back into iTunes
• iTunes recognises the iPhone and offers to set it up fresh or perform a restore. Pick restore
• Bingo!

Phew got a bit worried there for a moment. Hopefully this might help someone in the future!

Apple iPhone

I was lucky enough to receive an iPhone for Christmas and have been using it pretty solidly now for the last few days. You’ve no doubt read the huge reviews of the device a million times by now so I won’t go on about it, except perhaps  to say  it must be the single coolest device I’ve ever owned and used.

There a couple of things the iPhone is lacking of course, again these have been well publicised but the ones affecting me the most are the SMS functionality, more specifically the inability to address an SMS message to more than one recipient at once. The camera isn’t superb, being only 2MP and lacking a flash. I have a digital camera for taking proper pictures so again this doesn’t irk me too much. A native application for uploading pics to Flickr would have been a nice addition. I’m sure this will surface shortly after the iPhone SDK drops.

EDGE coverage is great in the Reading area, as is London of course. I tend to stick to the iPhone optimised sites and email on the move so the lack of bandwidth doesn’t affect me so much. As part of the o2 contract I can hop on to the Cloud’s wifi hotspots at most train stations, pubs etc as well which is nice when EDGE doesn’t cut it.

I’ve so far resisted the urge to jailbreak the phone to install the 3rd party native applications as I did with my iPod Touch which incidentally has been deprecated by the iPhone 🙂 Time will tell however if I can stick to the Apple endorsed software.

iPod Touch Hackage

Those clever hackers have finally jailbreaked the iPod Touch. After a little wrangling I’ve managed to unlock mine and have gone install crazy.

I’m loving the Mail and NES applications in particular. Checkout the springboard now:

EDIT: I followed these instructions for unlocking the touch with Windows.

Cloud WiFi Updates

I’ve been signed up to the Cloud.net iPod WiFi service for a week or so now and it seems as though the kinks have been ironed out. My previous complaints regarding dysfunctional hot-spots and the need to re-enter my account credentials for each and every hot-spot have been solved. The Cloud’s coverage is pretty good too. I can pretty much guarantee I’m never more than a few hundred yards in range of a hot-spot on my travels.

It’s a liberating experience to be so connected. Sure, I still cart my laptop around with me wherever I go and could theoretically be part of the cloud using that, but there’s something to be said for the instant accessibility of a handheld and Internet enabled device such as the iPod or iPhone.

One from the left field

Stephen Fry respected writer, actor etc. has posted a more than respectable write-up of the smart phone landscape including of course the Apple iPhone.

His writings put most “respected” tech journalists to shame. Take a look.