iPhone: iCal glitch & why it took me 22 hrs to set up my iPhone

Nearly 23 hours after I got my paws on an iPhone, I'm finally up and running, but it was far from painless.

The summary

• I was in the first group of 20 into the Apple store in Austin. I entered at 6pm to the applause of the staff (nice touch), bought 2 8Gig iPhones, and was on my way to my car by 6:04. Impressive!
• I came home and immediately tried to synch. Turns out I had to do some upgrading (yes, I should've known that). So, first I upgraded my system to 10.4.10 (I was one version behind) and iTunes.
• I went through the activation process, which went smoothly. I was porting my cell number from Verizon to AT&T.
• The last screen said it would be about 6 minutes to finish. I went to change, thinking I'd be leaving momentarily for a cocktail party, where I'd be able to show off my fabulous new toy.
• I came back to a screen that said roughly "it's going to take a while, we'll email you when we know how long. The neighbors may well have heard me yell at this point.
• Since I couldn't activate, I couldn't do anything - I couldn't use the iPod, the calendar, or even play with preferences.
• I went to the cocktail party, and rather pathetically showed off the Earth screen and emergency call pad.
• I was home an hour and a half later with an email saying it would be up to 24 hours before my phone was activated.
• I wrote my first bitchy blog post about it.
• I called the number in the email from AT&T to "make other arrangements". The first woman was nice, didn't know much about the iPhone, and gave me another number to call.
• I called that number. It was disconnected.
• I called the original number again, and a guy told me it'd be 6-24 hours - there was nothing he could do.
• This morning at 8am when I got up, my activation had gone through. I eagerly attempted a synch. No go. I got the error message shown in my last post. iTunes seemed to think the iPhone was disconnected. It wasn't.
• I restared my Mac. I restored the iPhone to factory settings. I tried a different USB port, and tried the synch with just the cable and again with the dock. Nada.
• I remembered that with my iPod, I've had trouble using the auto-synch feature of iTunes, so I tried synching manually. That seemed to work fine, and I thought I was set.
• But no. Everything synched except iCal. I tried manually synching just iCal, to no avail.
• Finally around 10:30 I called the iPhone help number. A recorded message said that due to heavy demand, my wait would be "5 minutes or greater." Understandable.
• 55 minutes later, I got a very nice guy who wasn't able to help. He said he'd connect me with someone for "more advanced" help.
• 1.5 hours later (!) I spoke with Nathan from Apple. Again, very nice. Finally I was going to get some help.

The iCal glitch
I have 6 calendars I use regularly. We experimented with trying to synch a single calendar at a time. At first it didn't work, and Nathan speculated that maybe you can't synch more than one calendar at a time. That would be a pretty glaring error if it was so.

My "home" calendar wouldn't synch. It would start, and I'd get the error message. If I synched any other single calendar on its own, however, it worked. Doing that, however, made each new calendar completely replace the previous one. Obviously, that wouldn't do. Then we discovered I was able to synch all calendars at once except for the "home" calendar. Something is apparently corrupted in that calendar.

So I've just spent the last hour going back and re-categorizing my calendars back to January. I deleted the Home calendar. It now synchs beautifully and completely.

My opinion, after a rocky start
The good

• It's lovely - feels good to hold, and I love the mutli-touch screen.
• It's fast, even on the EDGE network. I've played several iTunes videos with no cutting out.
• The browser is fantastic - surprisingly readable.
• I'm getting really good coverage with AT&T - better than with Verizon and miles better than with Sprint.
• The maps support is great - I easily get real-time traffic reports... sweet!
• The interface is elegant and mostly very intuitive. A few things will take a bit of getting used to, but that will happen quickly.
• Same goes for the keyboard. It'll take me a little while to get proficient, but I have no doubt that I will.
• I love the .com button on the keyboard.

The bad

• It felt hazardous to try to make a call while driving. The flow navigation doesn't work well with one hand. Once a bunch of people are on my "recents" list, this will be less of an issue, as I won't have to hunt for them.
• Making calls, even with "recents" takes too many touches. I want a favorites widget.
• 8Gigs will soon seem like not nearly enough. I'm already ready for an 80Gig iPhone :)

Overall, I love it, although my enthusiasm was seriously tempered because of my crappy initial experience. That'll wear off, though.

See also:
iPhone: still crippled, but getting there
iPhone: I'm officially pissed off

Comments

[dan]

I have the same problem. I can sync my music and contacts, but the calendar does not sync. "...iphone disconnected..." message

Help!!!

[dan]

I have the same problem. I can sync my music and contacts, but the calendar does not sync. "...iphone disconnected..." message

Help!!!

[Julie Gomoll]

Start by trying to sync one calendar at a time... it turned out for me that only 1 of 6 of my calendars wouldn't sync. Unfortunately, the only solution was to make a new calendar, relabel all the "bad calendar" events as new calendar events, and delete the corrupted one. The good new is it worked, and it now syncs fine.

I still don't know what caused the corruption. I relabeled events going back to January, and they all seem fine.

[Chad]

You guys are gonna love this. Yes there is a promblem syncing with iCal and it seems you have to go through the time consuming task of changing the calendars events belong to. This doesn't have to be done one event at a time though! You will save yourself a huge amount of time if you do this: first create a new calendar event. Then when you find a faulty calendar export it to your desktop. Next open the exported file. When you do you'll be prompted to pick a calendar to import to and you should pick the new empty calendar you created. Now delete the calander that won't sync. If only I had figured this out 10 hours ago!

[Jin]

I don't know how long syncing to iCal is suppose to take, but I think my Mac mini is having problems syncing with my iPhone. It takes forever and I just started using iCal. I also deleted all of the calendars (exported them first, thanks Chad!) and imported all of them into a single calendar. And the iCal syncs forever. I think there is something wrong. What can it be?

[Julie Gomoll]

Great idea, Chad - wish I would've thought of that sooner, too.

Jin - is everything else syncing ok? If it's just iCal, sounds to me like whatever was corrupted got imported into your new calendar. Do you still have the original calendar exports? Try importing, then syncing one at a time. Maybe you'll come across the corrupted one. Failing that, I'd make an appointment at the genius bar. Good luck!

[Cristine]

I just spent 10 hours with this problem and none of this advice helped, my ical sync just went on and on. Finally I found the answer on apple discussions. You need to launch isync and reset the old sync settings. That fixed everything.
I too LOVE my iphone and have been waiting for it for a year, but the activation and this issue was FRUSTRATING.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1016820&tstart=45

[Bob Hendrich]

Thanks Cristine! I had the same problem, and was not finding anything on Apple's discussion boards. That link did the trick (turns out turning off time zone support on the phone is necessary as well).

[Sam Johnson]

Hi Julie. You've probably found it by now, there's a favorites list for contacts, it's the icon on the bottom-left when you're in phone mode. I'm going to try the exporting calendars trick, hopefully that will work for me.

[Julie Gomoll]

Yeah, thanks Sam. That helps, but depending on what you were doing last, it can still be quite a few touches to make a call. And without the tactile response of a keyboard, it's just a bit more hazardous to call someone while driving.

[omar]

I did find a solution for the bug, it has something to do with having read only Calendars (subscribed and birthday Calendars) and they way they are sorted in the iCal application,
the details are in this link:

http://omarmd.tumblr.com/post/6159932

sure hope this helps you, as now i think i can sync all my calendars, and have my iphone entries actually show up on iCal.
good luck

[Julie Gomoll]

Wow, Omar, thanks. You just gave me a solution to this other problem which I just discovered today... events I enter on my iPhone (which is kind of a pain, I might add...) don't show up when I sync. Your solution couldn't have been better timed for me!