iOS 5 Upgrade Bricked My iPhone 4 (Stuck in Recovery Mode)

I want to know what happened and how could Apple have not seen this? I'm not worried so much about the data as the no phone. I can redownload Apps, I can add back photos and the email is still on the servers, but still no phone? I think this iPhone 4 club is huge!

Have the same problem, phone bricked and itunes keeps telling me my sims card is either missing or bad. Went to ATT last night card is fine. This is a huge mess. Will be heading to the apple store later to get this thing fixed.

So did AT&T say there is nothing they can do ?

Me too and when it was finally done 2 hours later everything was back except all my email messages are gone.

I've been having similar problems. Yesterday afternoon, kept getting error 3200. Finally got past that and got stuck on "Restoring iPhone apps". That looped for well over an hour. Finally gave up and left for home. Phone worked and had some new features; safari worked but purchased apps did not (although the icons were present) and none of my music or videos were present.

Plugged it in first thing this morning and got the same message "Restoring iPhone apps". after about 20 minutes or so, I got a new error code, -34. Search for that turned up negative. But then when I clicked on my phone in iTunes, it indicated that it was backing up the phone and re-installing apps. Biggest concern now is that the capacity bar is telling me I'm now somehow 8.7 GB over capacity (originally it said 7!). Not sure what's up with that. I know Apple said the new iOS would require more space on the phone but more than half the memory on a 16 GB phone seems a trifle excessive!

Exactly the same problem for me

This page helped me out a lot:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3694#error1603

I was scared that my phone had been bricked, but I followed the instructions for the error code I was seeing, and now my phone works fine.

My Phone has been plugged up for 12+ hours and still stuck in Reboot limbo... Any suggestions from the guys who got it to actually update?

Several of us that had this problem just keep redoing the process until it finally worked. It took me 7 minutes to download iOS5 but over 3 hours to get my phone back. In my particular case, I went to a 2nd pc at home and from that point on things returned to normal.

Now it's done to "only" 3.6 GB over capacity but it seems to be stuck again, now on step 5 of 5 for Syncing apps. It's saying "Waiting for items to copy". ***? Seems to be trying to put all of my apps - including ones I did not currently have installed - on the phone.

Howard Brazee wrote:

This and iTunes are what outsiders see. This and iTunes are how they evaluate Apple.

Correction -- these are what we "insiders" see, too. Android keeps looking better...

Maybe this is useful http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3694#error1603

i tried to update my 3gs it downloaded ok then when it was going onto my phone it was updating the drivers i then got a error now the phone is stuck in recovery mode when i try to recover using itunes it gets so far in then it like my phone disconnects itself then reconnects causing the pop up saying i need to reboot my phone i dont know what to do

Follow up:

Once it finally got passed the "restoring iphone apps" part, it tried to install every app I've ever downloaded that is still in my iTunes library. I had to manually go through and remove apps I didn't want and rebuild folders. Then I noticed I had a surplus of memory. Simple reason: the install had removed all of the music or movies I had on the phone. So I had to reinstall that as well. Finally seems to be back to 'normal', perhaps now I can start to learn what's new in iOS5.

Apple - sorry guys but you blew it big on this. After the record number of preorders last week, how could you have failed to anticipate the interest in this new iOS?

Download TinyUmbrella. Problem solved.