October 2011 Archives

IPhone 4S Upgrade

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Last Friday, I wandered by the Apple store.  Surprisingly, there was no line so I walked in and upgraded to the iPhone 4S.  I was planning on doing soon anyway (my 3GS is bonk), so I figured now was as good at time as any.

The migration of personal data from my 3GS to the 4S was a little painful -- I'll go into that later.  However, here are some tips that might make upgrading easier.

  1. Update to the latest version of Lion and iTunes on your Mac.  (For you PC users, I can't help you)
  2. Sync your old iPhone (the 3GS) with iTunes.
  3. Plug in your new 4S to iTunes.
  4. RESTORE your new 4S to the original settings.  (I know, I know...you shouldn't need to do this.)
  5.  RESTORE your 4S from backup.
  6. Walk through the menus to configure things up (e.g. activating iCloud).  You might still need to do a few more things like re-entering your email passwords.
  7. Re-boot.  A few apps were failing (e.g. Netflix).  Re-booting fixed the problem.

Before I used the above process, there were a few problems.

  • The Apple employees suggest that I copy my contacts from my 3GS and 4S, using their in house system for doing so.  This took like 45 minutes.   Wasn't worth the wait.
  • Seems like activating iCloud before transferring state from the 3GS to the 4S caused problems.
  • Not sure why the RESTORE to original settings was needed.  It seems like my new iPhone did pick up some new software even though iTunes says everything was up to date.  Simply synching or restoring from back up didn't work.
YMMV