Last Friday in a moment of complete madness and click happiness I okay’d an upgrade on the iPhone from firmware 1.0.2. to 1.1.1 and within 30 minutes wanted to throw myself from the Golden Gate to end it all. Ozzy and Sharon said this week that they made a pact that if either of them ever have an illness that effects their brain, they’d assist the other in not prolonging life any more. I thought that was kind of funny coming from a guy that bites off the heads of live bats and a woman that throws pot roasts over her fence at the neighbors… But I think Ben and I need to come up with something similar. If we’re ever forced into using a stupidly inferior firmware on our current obsession the other will find a way to quickly and quietly stop the other’s suffering at whatever cost.

The good news is that the directions offered up on hackin0sh to downgrade actually work. Although, it was much easier then they let on if you had never attempted to unlock your phone. After the restore and two runthroughs of the AppTapp.exe, I just let the phone “restore” via iTunes and BAM! Everything was back. MobileChat, Springboard and all the pretty themes, Customize, the NES emulator, iFlickr, all of my goodness was there.

If you have the phone, and you haven’t upgraded yet and you really depend on any of the awesome applications AppTapp provides, NO NOT UPGRADE. Not only did I lose all those apps, but my battery life was cut by about 25%. I’m not completely certain that was caused by 1.1.1 but today was the first day that I ran out of battery at work after 6 hours of video playback. Prior to this, I was easily making it the full 8 hours of video playback with battery life to spare.

I’m pretty dissappointed with how strict Apple is regarding 3rd party apps. They need to realize how upset people are. People were returning phones in the hopes of getting one that hadn’t been upgraded yet. It’s okay, Apple. We LOVE our iPhones. We’d DIE for our iPhones. We also love the ability to add pink icons to the desktop and to play Super Mario World on them. These apps are making an already awesome piece of equipment even better.

So here’s my suggestion to Apple: Buy AppTapp, open the source, allow geeks to make your product even more valuable to the end user, sell more phones, watch profit grow.

Oh yeah, if I suddenly disappear off the face of the earth one day, it COULD be because I didn’t read the little box that popped up and Ben’s kept up his end of the pact.