Mark Boulton

I was on a busi­ness trip last week, and as always, rely heav­ily on my iPhone for not only calls, but email, nav­ig­a­tion, and — cour­tesy of Air­Share — a method of car­ry­ing files to and from meet­ings. Who needs USB sticks, right? 

I’ve used this 3G phone since August without too many prob­lems. Well, that’s not strictly true, I’ve had the usual phantom restarts, blank screens, and gen­eral soft­ware lag. Just like every­one else. But, as I’m an Apple fan­boy, I’ve put up with it, hope­ful that with sub­sequent soft­ware releases, the plat­form would become more stable. The pit­falls of early adoption. 

That all came to a grind­ing, abrupt halt on Thursday when my phone croaked and then died. 

Here’s what happened. 

I’d just fin­ished a call. Then two minutes later, I tried to call someone else. The iPhone was just a white screen. Unre­spons­ive. I turned it off, turned it back on. Same thing. This was a prob­lem as, because of Air­Share, I had some import­ant doc­u­ments I’d just picked up from a cli­ent (who needs USB sticks right?), that I needed to review on the jour­ney back to Cardiff. Back to the white screen. This must be a known issue, so I star­ted on the hunt to track down either some wifi, or at the very least, a book on the iphone, where it might just give me some indic­a­tion of what to do. Even a hard restart. I could live with that. 

Sod’s Law dic­tates that ‘if some­thing can go wrong, it will’. Fol­low­ing missed trains, can­celled trains, moment­ary panic when I thought I’d lost my wal­let. All of this without being able to call any­one, email any­one, Google for help. In a crowded sta­tion, I felt com­pletely alone and help­less. Then, I came to my senses. I wasn’t going to let blind panic ruin an oth­er­wise good day.

I couldn’t find a book, and the wifi was down. My last resort was to quickly hook into the wifi in the sta­tions en-route to Cardiff. Read­ing, Did­cot, Swin­don, & Bris­tol all have wifi, so I was able to snatch moments to try to get to the bot­tom of the mys­ter­i­ous White Screen Of Death. 

Com­mon problem

Turns out it hap­pens a fair bit. Your iPhone will enter some kind of error loop. It will still be vis­ible to iTunes. In fact, it will still be oper­able ‘behind’ the white screen — you just can’t see any­thing. It can usu­ally be fixed by a hard restart of the device. Hold­ing down home and sleep for 10 seconds should sort it out. Well, it didn’t. Fail­ing that, I read, you might need to do a fact­ory restore. Bug­ger. Not to worry, I have a backup, should be fine. Although, I didn’t backup Air­Share before get­ting this import­ant file. 

The restore didn’t work either. 

Apple were sur­pris­ingly help­ful. ‘It’s defect­ive’, I was told. Yes. It is. ‘Take it back to where you bought it, and they will replace it’. All good. 

O2 where actu­ally quite help­ful too. Although, it was all a bit of a head­ache. They couldn’t issue a replace­ment, as they had to send it off for repair. So, I had to buy a new hand­set, wait for the replace­ment to come through and then get a refund on that hand­set. A lot of mess­ing around. Why can’t they just replace the hand­set? Why can’t O2 inter­face with Apple cus­tomer sup­port (with ref­er­ence num­bers)? Why does the con­sumer have to jump through hoops to replace a defect­ive handset?

Over-reliance

This whole epis­ode made me real­ise the over-reliance I have on this phone. The grav­it­a­tion from simple phone, to mobile com­puter has made busi­ness pos­sible on the move, but with that, it’s made busi­ness poten­tially impossible too. Pre­vi­ously, when trav­el­ling, I’d be incom­mu­nic­ado. Sure, I could answer the phone etc. but the enforced solitude from the daily grind had massive bene­fits. Not just the head­space it provides, but by not rais­ing expect­a­tion of what I could and would do whilst sat there watch­ing the world go by. 

I learnt some import­ant les­sons about data too. I lost that import­ant file from a cli­ent. I lost the time to review it on the jour­ney. The fol­low­ing day, I had to call to explain, the file was resent, reviewed etc. Luck­ily there was a copy. Air­Share is a cool app, but I was using it in the wrong way. I won’t be doing it again.