About a month ago I made the mistake of leaping onto the cutting edge of firmware updates and almost ended up being left on the bleeding edge. Version 2.2 of the iPhone firmware had just been released, and instead of doing the cautious “wait and see” for a week or two to see if there were any problems, I went blissfully ahead.

Possibly it was the promised Google Street View which caused me to throw caution to the wind. It definitely wasn’t the on the go downloading of podcast episodes, as I have had this feature on the Haier Ibiza Rhapsody for ages. Everything seemed to go well.

The following morning I turned on the iPhone to be greeted by this screen:

Now, I never had a first generation iPhone which could be activated a home, but I do remember that a similar screen was displayed the first time I turned on my iPod Touch. Basically it meant “Synchronize with iTunes before using this device.”  My first was that the firmware upgrade had messed up the iPhone and it would have to be re-activated. Then I took a deep breath and rebooted the iPhone. The following screen was displayed:

I was relieved. This was more familiar territory. The iPhone was working and hadn’t lost any information. The message abut the iPhone being activated was a bit puzzling.

The strange this about this is that I have not seen any mention of it on the forums. There is a possibility that most iPhone owners just never turn their phones off. I do, every night, and it is only when the iPhone has been off for a while that this might happens . This has only happened on a handful of occasions since then, and I can’t seem to duplicate it - which really bothers my logical cause-and-effect computer brain…