My iPhone 3G bothered me over the last weeks. Why?
Well – my job brings a lot of travelling to me – almost every day I have to drive by car from Austria to Germany. So every day I’m leaving Austria the iPhone has to connect to a german partner provider (T-Mobile A –> T-Mobile D). Every phone I owned previously was doing this by itself – but not the iPhone. It just lost the connection and did nothing to connect to the partner provider.
Yes – I know… there is a preference I have to set to automatically switch. And guess what? Yeah – the preference was set to ‘automatic’… but it simply didn’t connect.

I always had to do this switch manually by opening the preferences menu and selecting the partner provider after the iPhone was showing up the list of providers it found.
That procedure took me sometimes up to 2 or 3 minutes… unacceptable.
Yesterday i missed several calls due to the fact that I simply forgot to switch to the german provider – bad luck, yeah. Really bad luck. But – this was the initial kick for me to get this ‘bug’ fixed.
But what should I do? I resetted the phone several times before without any change… So this was not the point. Soft-Resetting is just one way to reset your iPhone. You also have the possiblility to completely reset the phone to it’s basics by using the reset-option in the preferences menu (preferences/general/reset); therefor I yesterday used the option ‘Erase All Content and Settings’…

After resetting the iPhone the phone was setup as it was when I got it out of the box. Switching on showed me to connect the phone via USB cable to the computer / iTunes.
As soon as iTunes started up the phone was recognized and I was asked to reinstall the last backup – or to tread the phone as a completely new one. So I wanted to start over from the beginning and selected therefor the option to treat the phone as a new one.
Seconds later the phone was re-activated (yes it was deactived by erasing all the content) – and then a first synchronization was performed. I had to re-organize all the apps – and yes, for sure – all the infos stored on the phone have really been deleted (including all the login infos – e.g. Skype, Nimbuzz, 1Password…) – be aware if you do it the same way: you don’t get these kind of data back synched; you have to take care about this data by yourself BEFORE you start over resetting the phone. Finally Contacts & mail accounts where transferred so that the phone was perfectly setup.
The question was – would it work? Would the provider switch be done automatically? I was really looking forward to the next day ๐
And yeah – it really worked like a charm! The provider switched within seconds now.
Sideeffects? Some…
- The phone generally got faster. This was specially recognized at the iPod features like ‘Genius Mixes’.
- Battery indicator wasn’t showing the ‘%’ version any more; that’s a 3GS feature – but was showing on the 3G because I JB’ed it in the past (before updating to iPhone OS 3.x)
- Battery capacity – the phone now is’nt that much battery hungry it was before
So for now – I’m happy again with my iPhoneย ๐