iPhone User Experience Fail

This afternoon I planned to go play in the AppStore. Since everyone’s been raving on about all the cool apps in there I figured I must be missing something – Don’t get me wrong I’ve been in there before but I’m not really an apps person. I use the built in phone capabilities and the occasional app to get the odd job or two done.

Turns out that since the last time I turned on my iphone the beta of iphone OS 4 has expired so my iphone is just sitting there blinking at me indicating that I need to connect to iTunes. I connected to my PC and opened up iTunes (I could almost feel the groan from my computer when I did this). It then comes up with a message saying the iphone software has expired – great, so update it for me. No chance! Restore…. Fail, Check for Updates….. none available, you’re running v4.0 which is the latest and greatest…. not!

Thinking that of course my PC is stupid and what would it know I powered up my Mac. Same deal. I went to the iphone developer website in order to get the v4.0 update and ran into two issues:

– I’ve got two developer profiles with Apple for the companies that I work with. This means that when you sign in they ask you which profile you want to connect to. Do you think I could select one and proceed? Not a hope!

– Once I finally restarted my browser, cleared the cache etc I went back to the iphone dev centre it came up with a message saying it was being updated and to come back soon…. FAIL – you mean I have to sit here with a iphone that doesn’t work?

The work around was simple enough – back to the PC, open the iphone dev centre (which for some reason still works on my PC), download the update, copy update to mac (so I can update my iphone), update iphone from iTunes (on the Mac).

Honestly, that they have the nerve to accuse other companies of a poor user experience…..

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