So, the time finally came to move the iPhone 3GS to iOS 5, given that it’s my primary communication device and I couldn’t afford to install Developer betas on it and risk being incommunicado.
First up, I tried to sync my photos with iPhoto ’09. There were some problems with this as it kept complaining about missing photos. My eventually solution to this was to grab a copy of Phone Disk and back up all the files on the phone.
Next I set Contacts to sync with iTunes, and synced it a couple of times.
Selecting syncing of apps seemed to indicate that everything was going to be deleted. So I option-clicked on the phone and chose ‘transfer purchases’, which seemed to eventually solve that problem.
Then I tried to sync. Unfortunately I kept getting an “Error -50”, which wasn’t particularly informative. I eventually worked out that iTunes was doing a backup before the update, which meant that it was wanting lots of disk space.
So, lots of disk space cleared I proceeded to update the phone. Hmmm… all my apps are missing from the phone.
So then I option click the device name again and use the ‘Restore from backup’ option. Two hours later iTunes has restored everything to the phone (I’m sure my Newton restored faster. Hopefully over the air syncing will speed this up now rather than relying on the slowness of USB).
Except that now all my Apps are on the phone, listed as “Waiting…” for download. So I go into the phone’s App store and choose to redownload my purchases. One by one… as every time I choose to download it the App store app returns to the launchpad screen. I suspect I can probably fix this by doing another sync (I’ll try over the air this time).