My First iPhone Problem and Post: Google Maps Hardlocking

I had been using my iPhone without a problem since I got it opening day, June 29th at the Manhattan Beach Apple Store. [Thanks fulk dog for waiting in line!] Everything was awesome; contacts, pictures, youtube, Safari integration, everything. No problem activating it, like others have reported.

I didn't usually let people handle it, I'm crazy like that, because they would have no idea where to start. So I would show them around all of the features; usually open up my Boards of Canada video to display the screen, surf the contacts and show them how to put their number into the phone, and/or show them Safari and my friend Deward's blog (since it looks super nice in the iPhone browser) depending on if I was on a wireless network or AT&T's EDGE. Take a picture, show them some pictures from that bar crawl from mid-June. Normal things that you would do with an integrated device that bills itself as a revolution!

So, fast forward to last Saturday night. I let my friend's sister borrow my iphone just to play around with everything. He is technically apt, so I thought he could navigate the menu with minimal advice ("Just hit the Home button to reset any interface."). I was wrong. This was in Manhattan Beach, which has notoriously bad network coverage between Highland Ave. and the beach (due to the housing height and density, called "The Beach District"). He hands it back to me after like 5 minutes with "I think I broke it." No problem I thought, he just couldn't get back to the home screen. Well, that wasn't the case.

The iPhone was stuck in the Google Maps application with the /Manhattan Beach, CAirvine/ text, which is an obvious mistyped search into the search bar of Google Maps. I'm not sure if it was the maps application or the lowsy EDGE connection, but it was frozen, half-dimmed with neither of the buttons working: holding down the Home key, or the On/Off toggle at the top did not seem to do anything**. Even plugging the phone into iTunes did not remove the lock. I had to do a Factory Reset via the iTunes interface to remove the Google Maps hardlocked screen. Sucks.

'Cause after using the phone for 2 weeks, I already had multiple pictures, Wireless settings, and histories built up that were cleared. All of the pictures taken with the camera that were not emailed off the phone are lost, my long ass password for my WPA account had to be re-typed, and my Youtube and Safari bookmarks and history were gone. Luckily, it sync'ed my contacts and everything else. (installing gcaldemon now to test it out...)

I guess that is what you get when you are an early iphone adopter. It is worth it though. ;)

** Supposedly holding down both buttons at once will hardboot the iphone. 20/20 hindsight