The release of the second generation of iPhones has been an event of surprising excitement. I even have friends who camped out in front of the local Apple Store overnight to be able to say "I'm the first!" for the new 3G phone.

However, many of the benefits of the new phone, including notably the new system software and many upgraded applications, along with being able to access the new Apple iPhone Applications Store, are available to first generation iPhones with just a little upgrade...

Here's how it worked for me...

First up, the cheery message that there WAS an upgrade when I connected my phone to a Mac running iTunes 7.7 (yes, you need to upgrade iTunes first. If you haven't, just choose "Software Update..." from the Apple menu):

Well, heck yeah, I'll accept that upgrade!

I choose "Download and Install" since I really want to have it happen, not just collect the software for later application. Now I get the first of a couple of warning messages:

I'm good with that - I like that it automatically backs up everything and restores it all when done. If that works properly, this could be the least hassle upgrade ever.

Now it tells me that there's a download in progress:

Want more information? On the left side of iTunes, while there's a download in progress, you'll see "Downloads" under the store section. Click on it and you can see how far along you are and how big the update is:

Eventually it finishes up and it's time for the Dance of the Progress Bars...

and

and a'one and a'two...

Not done yet...

Let's progress just a bit more...

And one more for luck...

Finally, about 10-15 minutes later, we've completed the dance and get the delightful confirmation:

And that's where I hit the brick wall of too much popularity:

For reasons I don't fully understand, even though my phone is ostensibly fully updated to the 2.0 software and fully restored, there's one last visit to the iTunes Store that needs to happen for things to work, and the extraordinary popularity of this upgrade is clearly more than the Apple servers can handle.

End result? I have a temporarily (I hope!) dead iPhone that can only make emergency calls and is otherwise completely useless. I have tried for the last 45 minutes to complete this last step and just see this same error over and over again.

I'll stop my blog entry now so I can publish it and hopefully you'll have better luck, but you may just want to not be a bleeding-edge adopter like me. Losing my cellphone for the day is going to be a big drag, needless to say!

Update! After hours of failure, I got it to work. Here's how it finished up...

I unplugged and replugged-in the iPhone, and here's what I saw:

A bit more time passes, and...

That's what you want to see!

When the phone does resurface in iTunes, for just a minute you'll see that it's empty, but then the automatic restore kicks in:

Finally, after some time passes, there's a new tab in town:

And under the Applications tab...

Time to sync? Here's something new:

Finally, finally, we've got an iPhone running version 2.0 firmware. Congratulations!

Wondering how to download applications in iTunes? Check out my tutorial: download applications from the Apple iPhone Apps Store. If you haven't been here before, this site also has a huge amount of iPhone help to peruse too.