Yes, he's on OS3.1 on his iPhone and he's getting really pissed. Seems he can barely even keep his phone on at all anymore.

Thanks for this thread gerbick...

...before the thread is taken over by helpful folks who might imply that your problems are because of operator error, I want to reemphasize your original point that the iPhone doesn't always "just work".

Someone on Twitter just mentioned that an update was just released, 3.1.1. Perhaps it will help you.

I wish it were just user error. In fact, I'm even willing to admit when it is user error.

But a blank phone, that got upgraded to 3.0 from 2.2.1 and had no phone numbers/contacts, apps or anything on it was what happened initially. They replaced that 3G with an 3GS by mistake. I felt like the honorable thing was to replace the 3GS with my original purchased (platform-wise at least) 3G and not try to "get over"... and that phone came with 3.0 on it.

Updated to 3.1 and... return of the sluggishness et al. And not, 15 minute reboots - if an app gets cranky or something - and today... a flood of messages that came from nowhere. Apparently, I missed even more in the last day (Saturday) and early Saturday, I got my Thursday night/Friday (whole day) messages and voice mails.

I've wiped it clean, forced a reinstall of the 3.1 from scratch and my boots are now under 1 minute. I've hand re-installed each of the apps, turned off, then turned back on to see if any of them were the culprit.

So far, so good. But I've been at it for over 2 hours.

Another friend of mine, he's been stuck with a 1604 error since Wednesday. He's on a PC, I'm on a Mac. He's not a heavy user, I am. He's not upgraded since 2.2.1 and I had upgraded twice on my original phone, once on this replacement, and the 3GS already had 3.0.1 but I gave it back because I wanted to be honest.

My app list is anemic. Barely two pages. And no mods. Nothing odd. Hell, I'm not even using Push. Manual e-mail retrieval...

3.1 is what showing up for me as the last update, no 3.1.1.

@zerojay: thanks for the headsup, but I think 3.1.1 might be referring to ipod touch's firmware.

The rumor is Apple is doing their best to force everyone to upgrade to 3.1.1. My iPod touch got hosed on Thursday for some reason and I had to do a low level refresh: Turn off, plug in, hold down power key, wait, hold down home key, wait till screen goes blank, release power key, wait till iTunes gives me a refresh dialog box. I clicked okay and then iTunes downloaded and restored me to 3.1.1. Everything's fine now, but it wasn't a cool experience.

Hopefully that rumor isn't true. If it's one thing I've learned from both the hardware and software side of computing. Never upgrade until all the issues are ironed out. No matter how good the features look. Hope things turn out better gerbick.