The big day has finally come. You rushed to download iPhone OS 3.0, sat on the edge of your seat as your handset did its thing, and then.. nothing. No glorious homescreen, no new search pane. You look over at your monitor, and sure enough – iTunes is spitting out error messages.
Fear not, though. If you’re getting activation errors or having a hard time connecting to iTunes, you’re by no means alone. Give it a few minutes and try again or, as I imagine most people are doing, just sit there and try over and over again until it works. It took about 8 tries to get ours activated and running after updating to the final 3.0 build (which, by the way, is 7A341 – just like last week’s developer release. If you updated to the most recent developer build, you don’t need to update again.)
While it’s somewhat reasonable to expect the servers to strain under the pressure of many thousands of people all trying to download hundreds of megabytes each, it’s still quite unfortunate. For plenty of users, the mobile has replaced the landline; however it takes for them to get activated, that’s how long they’re detached from the world. When a release goes live in the middle of a work day, that can be bad news.