Finally, OS3 for the iPhone is out — and against my better judgment, I decided I wanted copy-and-paste now. So I did the iPhone 3.0 upgrade, and now my phone is dead. Like many others, I’m getting the dreaded “unknown error” message. And looking to Apple for guidance, I come away feeling frustrated.
After my upgrade was done, my phone was left with an icon message to plug it into iTunes and only able to make emergency calls. As for iTunes, it gave the message screenshotted above, which says:
We could not complete your iTunes Store Request. An unknown error occurred (-4).
There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later.
Shortly after getting this, I saw Matt Cutts tweet that I wasn’t alone. Hundreds on Twitter — more like thousands at this point — were tweeting about similar problems. Try searches for itunes store request or unknown error, and you’ll see them.
You also see a lot of sad, frustrated and sometimes angry people getting no help. People are tweeting uncertain if they’ve “bricked” their phone and made it unusable. People are looking for help.
And Apple? It’s not helping. I tried a search on the iPhone support site for “unknown error occurred (-4)” and got nothing useful.
I checked the iPhone support page and found nothing alerting people that Apple’s aware of the problem.
I checked the iPhone discussion group and got an amazing “We’ll be back soon” message.
I’ve just gone back, and at least now there’s a thread on the topic. Supposedly it’s here, but if you try to read it, you get — yep — an error message and taken to this holding page.
Way to fail, Apple.
If you have news on how to solve the problem, please post below. I’ll also update as I learn more. For related discussion on the new software and the iPhone 3Gs launch, see Techmeme. Also see an upgrade cluster on Techmeme here.
Postscript: Flash Gordy suggested I try plugging directly into my computer rather than a hub. Did that, and problem solved. Or maybe whatever network issues with the iTunes store were happening got sorted out.
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