Nightly iOS 5 upgrade disabled my iPhone
I was too lazy to update yet to the release from the latest iOS 5 beta on my iPhone 3GS (I'm a developer). Although it was slow as molasses, I knew from the update on my iPad2 that it could take many hours. And it worked, so why update? And I expected to get an iPhone 4S when they were available in my little grotto of the world, so why update?
Well, now I know why you should update vigorously with your beta products, or they do it themselves.
I awoke last night because of a bright light. My iPhone had decided it could wait no longer and updated itself. Or so it seemed. When I looked closer in the morning I saw that it needed to re-activate itself. I went through the motions, but lo and behold: it could not connect to Apple's Activation Server. It was temporarily unavailable. I tried again and again over the last several hours (07:30 - 10:30), but the server remains unavailable. Meanwhile, my phone is unusable.
Thanks Apple, for updating my phone without warning, and render it disabled!
So, what to do?
Reset the thing and update from a downloaded iOS 5 .ipsw file? But that might wipe all my data, and I can't make a backup when it is in 'activation mode'. There might still be some pictures on the phone which I wanted to get off it.
I tried both my cable and adsl internet connections, because of Akamai checksum errors in the past, to no avail.
I will hold out a little longer, and then take the plunge of --trying to-- update from the ipsw image.
Axel Roest