Friday, January 25, 2008

Unbricking my iPhone - Act 2

So I finally found the time to book the Genius bar for Tuesday at 7 pm, at the Stanford Shopping Center.

Unfortunately, my life is quite busy these days and I was running late. People told me "they will never wait for you". I confidently thought "a Genius will wait for me", hopped in my car, called the Apple store (maybe I was not that confident, after all) and Joe answered with a reassuring "sure, take your time".

I walked into the store, my name was on the screen, the Genius wasn't there. I asked and a nice lady told me "the Genius is in the back of the store, he will be back shortly". Wow, they REALLY call him "The Genius"!!

John the Genius showed up, looked at the phone, rebooted it, virtually touched his lamp (the iPhone was not touchable) and exclaimed "I need to take your iPhone and give you a new one. Is it ok?".

HE IS A GENIUS, AFTER ALL!

Yes, it was ok for me. I signed a piece of paper, I received a probably refurbished iPhone 4GB (where did they get one is a mystery), which has the latest version of the OS and baseband 4.6
(unlockable, as of today). I went home, jailbroke it, put Funambol on it and the next morning I gave my first demo.

Impressions of Act 2:
  1. The genius waited for me, even if I was late. +3 Apple
  2. The genius swapped my phone with no questions. +10 Apple
Impressions of Act 1 + Act 2: not that bad (-2 Apple). Overall, the experience was very good, once I had the appointment set up. I agree with the idea of having a smart dude check the device before giving you a new one (sound business idea from Apple). However, they should not force you to wait the entire weekend for that. With a bit more people at the Genius bar (or a preference for iPhone issues, since you are paying them a monthly fee anyway), they would get a big round of applause from me.

Now I would recommend them to build more robust devices, but this is a different story...