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My iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade experience turned into something of a disaster: I had been waiting patiently the entire day of the 17th of June for the download to become available. Early on in the day, it seemed as though a download link to the update had been found, but that file turned out to be the 3.0 update file for the iPhone 3GS. Finally, later that evening the update file was made available by Apple. In true herd fashion, I connected my MacBook to the home wireless network, docked the iPhone and rapidly clicked through the prompts as iTunes requested permission to download the new OS and to update the device. The best part of the evening was spent watching the file trickle down the Interwebs, finally finishing off after fifty minutes or so. That should have been the worst of it. Sadly, it wasn’t. Just a few, brief minutes into the device update and I was shown an error message: the update had terminated due to an unknown error. Would I be interested in trying again? Twice more I retried the 3.0 update, each time seeing nothing more than the message that an unknown error had occurred. A reboot and another retry without success.

I managed to restore from a 2.2.1 file I had on my hard drive, forcing iTunes to use that file to rebuild the iPhone and restore my settings. After a long waiting period, the iPhone was at last usable again, though unable to provide copy and paste…

I had a similar experience with the iPod Touch whilst on holiday in December when trying to update the OS of that device. Again, the issue occurred whilst using iTunes on the MacBook. I can’t see the MacBook being the problem. Rather, I’m rather certain that TuneUp may be at fault – though that is unconfirmed. I can only comment on how unreliably TuneUp starts up at times, hides itself behind other windows and sometimes seems not to start up properly at all.

I fixed the iPhone update issue the same way I fixed the iPod Touch update issue: by connecting the device to my Windows PC and running the update from its iTunes software install. No hassle – everything worked seamlessly.

I’ll be quite honest: the 3.0 software update is hardly revolutionary. In fact, I doubt that I have even noticed any difference over the past few days. Copy and paste is something I still need to perform. Odd, that. One would think that such a feature is indispensable, but I seem not to require it too often. Most annoyingly, I’ve found that the iPhone is no longer very good at picking up my wireless network at home. Connecting to that network takes much longer and often, the connection is simply not picked up. For the rest, everything works and the inclusion of a Finder is a godsend. Better than copy and paste any day, I’d say.

And then, there’s tethering. That’s interesting for the way Apple has made it work: seamlessly and elegantly. In fact, tethering is so simple that I found myself trying to figure out what else to configure by the time it was already working. I’m on the MTN network, but the following should work just as well for Vodacom. Open Safari on the iPhone and navigate to the following URL http://wan.to/iphone.

Simply follow the instructions and install the appropriate configuration file for your operator.

Navigate to the Network options under Settings, then General. The Internet Tethering item should be available now.

Tethering works by Bluetooth or USB cable.

I tried it with the USB cable on my Windows 7 system.

Simply enabling the Internet Tethering option establishes the connection: no worrying about modem settings or anything else. The first time this feature is used on a Windows system, the appropriate driver is installed. That’s all there’s to it.

Start browsing on the attached system, then simply turn tethering off when finished.