iPhone Restore with imperfect internet - a world of hurt.

Sitting here, in the country side, with a very slow internet connection and an iPhone which most likely has a software problem, I thought I would share the numerous issues I fallen across for what is a simple matter, when living in a big city.

First off, I cannot see anyway to even begin to restore an iPhone without an internet connection.

Next, although iOS 5.0 has been downloaded to this computer, iTunes is insisting on downloading 5.0.1 before doing a restore.

Can Apple really be so sure iOS 5.0.1 introduces no new bugs and that simply reloading what used to work fine will be worse every time than a brand new iOS?

Apple Self Service doesn't work in Thailand(as the network operators are said to supply support), so I am guessing that means no remote Apple Service to somehow override iTunes.

Anyway, on to the real frustrations...
It seems to be impossible to start or restart the download of iOS 5.0.1 without the iPhone connected with the SIM card installed(I removed the SIM and put it in an old Nokia so I at least have a phone number that works) - and now I need to remove the SIM from the working phone for the sole purpose of starting and restarting the iOS download.

As this internet connection so slow/drops out every hour or so and the download is predicted to last 2-3 hours AND astonishingly the iOS download RESTARTS FROM SCRATCH every time it has a network issue.

CATCH22

..the iOS download may never finish.

The inability for iTunes to recover from a network issue and continue downloading a 790mb file is hopeless.

Given that slow/unreliable internet and distance from any Apple Store go hand in hand - I think this is a show stopper for country folk - I could not possibly recommend an iPhone to anyone outside a solid broadband area.

Thanks, eventually the download completed and the restore as expected fixed the issue. The iPhone is not jail broken and I did not want to do that for this phone.

The point for Apple is that they have designed and are selling a product which can quickly become about as useful as Rubber Duck Anchor unless you have fast internet. This was not the case for earlier iPods and the early days of the iPhone.

It was all very well to dump the diskette drive about 5 years after that was due, it just seems to me that Apple are moving too fast to try and kill CDs and DVDs, way before their own technology is ready.

As for this being the way software distribution is going, let me say that I was an earlier adopter of AppleTV and love it but ever since the iOS came out I had no end of trouble even with very fast internet. Buying a whole TV series season is something I stopped doing because I was forever finding missing episodes where the download failed but iTunes was glibly unawares. While most of the time the iTunes staff would eventually repost the missing episode, it was a whole lot more trouble than it was worth to do that for a $1.99 worth of TV episode, and as it's the sort of thing you really want to watch at the time you expect - not 3 days later after Apple reply and imply their system is perfect and they are doing you a favor - I gave up and started to just repurchase when things were missing. ...eventually as this irritated me I went back to DVDs delivered from Amazon, which most of the time is a lot cheaper anyway.

BTW

...for anyone interested I will describe the problem which the restore factory defaults and fixed.

Like many other people I found that the iPhone 4 running iOS 5.0 suddenly failed to switch to turn on the speaker when calling someone - their phone rang and they could hear me, but I could not hear anything, either on the speakerphone option or normal speaker.

Bluetooth has never been used on this phone, but skype was working fine.

There were a few other symptoms like: I could not hang up, and calls were not being logged in recents.

I tried simply upgrading to iOS 5.0 first, which had no effect but the full restore factory defaults from iTunes worked.