August 17, 2013

  • iPhone 5 PITA

    My dad has always been an iPhone guy. He always got the latest iPhone when it came out. But with bigger, non-apple phones coming out, the iPhone staying relatively the same size, and my dad's eyesight not getting any better, he finally gave in and got a Samsung Galaxy S4, for the bigger screen. Apparently, he's had it for a while and I had no clue. I only found out when I tried to facetime with him to help him use the scanner at home, and Androids dont' do facetime. He had a iPhone 5. My iPhone 4 was slowly crapping out on me and was I ready to upgrade but was waiting on the the announcement of the new iPhone or the release of the HTC One Mini. So naturally, I called dibs on the iPhone 5. He said he was going to send it to the Philippines if I didn't ask for it. REALLY?! He's sent all his other iPhone's there (that I hadn't used). His friends over there must get excited when a new phone comes out over here, cause that normally means they'll get his old phone.

    I was adamant about not getting the iPhone 5 because of the stupid lightning cable, but I'm not going to say no to a free phone. I've already bought one 30-pin to lightning adapter, and I'm probably going to buy more, but I'm exploring other options, like the micro usb to lightning adapter. But I'll wait and see if I actually stick with this phone before I buy more stupid accessories.

    Switching to new phones is usually easy: create a backup of old phone in iTunes, plug in phone, restore from backup, and that's it. It worked when I went from the 2G to the 4, and so that's what I did when I went from the 4 to the 5. Everything transferred over, all my contacts, pictures, ringtones, apps, everything. I could send and receive calls & texts, and connect to bluetooth and wifi. But the crucial thing that didn't work was the data plan. No 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, nothing. All that previously worked when my dad used it. When I got the sim card switched out, we didn't test the network data portion. We tried calls & text, and I was connected to the AT&T Store's wifi, so webpages loaded normally. It wasn't till the next day, at work, that I found out that data didn't work. During my lunch break, I went to the AT&T Store in the downtown plaza to have them fix it. They reset my settings, changed out my sim card, but still no worky. I had to leave before they could find out what was wrong because I didn't want to be gone from the office too long. So after work, I go to the store where I got the sim card, and they do all the same things the other store did, but since I didn't have any time constraints, they tried more stuff. And eventually, about 1.5 hours later, they got it work. They figured it was a software issue because they put my sim card in another iPhone 5 and data worked fine. So I had completely wipe all data from my phone, and then setup the phone as a new phone and not restore from my backup. Apparently there is some setting in my backup that's preventing data from working. So I had to manually download all my apps, reconfigure my folders & layouts, and re-assign ringtones & other settings. Luckily I had a separate backup of all my contacts. That would suck to re-enter all my contacts info.

    So switching to the iPhone 5 was a 2+ day process. I've more or less got everything back to way I had it on the 4, but I haven't rebuilt all my playlists yet. Since my laptop crashed, I lost all my playlists and have to recreate them. I've only redone 2 of them and haven't gotten around to others yet. Now if I had an Android, I could make a playlist on my PC, and then just drop & drag it over. So easy. And I freakin' hate iTunes 11. They always gotta change things up to supposedly make things "easier" for the user. Yeah, it's easier for me to get filled with rage trying to do simple stuff, like create a playlist. The old look & style is disable by default, and you have to search to re-enable it. So stupid.