Today, my iPhone died.
No idea why, but whilst developing an application for it using Xcode, I lost the ability to deploy my application to my phone. Xcode told me to try restarting my phone… I did, and my perfectly working phone never managed to make it back to my normal home screen. After staring at the "Emergency calls only" screen for a while, I tried the various things one does at this point.
- Restore the phone using iTunes – except that iTunes couldn’t see the Phone.
- Remember that Xcode can do restore and use that… the restore fails halfway through "BBand update error".
- Try restoring with Xcode again. This succeeds, but the iPhone needs to be "activated through iTunes.
- Open iTunes, which offers to restore the phone from a backup. After trying this, I return to step 1 with a broken phone again.
- Bang phone against the desk a few times. Didn’t help.
Carphone Warehouse (where I got the phone) won’t be able to do much more than send the phone to Apple, so I’ll probably make a trip to the Apple Store instead. In the meantime, I’m trying to restore the phone from XCode again, and merely activate the phone through iTunes, rather than restoring a backup. Let’s see if that works…
UPDATE (2 minutes later): No it didn’t. Phone is asking for emergency calls only, iTunes says "There is a problem with your iPhone". I’d guessed this.
Bens House 
Instead of banging the phone against the desk, have you thought about the next step of banging your head against a brick wall? Please don’t! Try the Apple store first, though you may have to wait for the replacement….. thoroughly annoying I know.
Had to wait a whole 40 minutes for a replacement, and had the inconvenience of meeting Stephen Fry whilst I was there. But then you’ll already know that from Facebook 😉