I just plugged my iPhone into my MacBook Pro via USB and was immediately informed that there was a new version of the iPhone software available and I was asked if I wanted to install that software. I clicked yes and the process started. While it was doing its thing, I moved over into my Windows XP instance running in VMWare Fusion. Well, part of the process of updating the iPhone involved the iPhone restarting and when it restarted, because I was using VMWare Fusion, VMWare Fusion grabbed the USB connection and this completely hosed the iPhone. Let me be clear: it didn't just mess up the update, it hosed the iPhone--meaning it wouldn't work at all. It isn't that the iPhone connecting to the Windows XP instance in VMWare Fusion hoses the iPhone inherently; in fact, in a normal circumstance, connecting the iPhone to the Windows XP instance in VMWare Fusion would be no problem at all. What is a problem, however, is the iPhone losing the connection to iTunes in the middle of the update process.

So my only choice was to restore the iPhone to factory settings and from there to restore the phone's settings from a backup. I'm not sure that before beginning the update iTunes bothers to do a backup of your iPhone (if it doesn't, it sure should and I recommend that you do your own backup before letting iTunes do a software update), but in any case it seems I was able to restore from a recent enough backup that I didn't lose much, if anything. Because I'm using over-the-air Exchange synchronization, my most imporant data (Contacts, Calendar, Email) are not synced via iTunes so fortunately there was no risk of losing any of that data.

But even though in the end I lost little to nothing, the whole process of restoring is long and a rather big pain in the butt. So for that reason alone, I highly recommend avoiding it at all costs--and that means making sure the USB connection between your machine and your iPhone is not interrupted when you're updating the iPhone's software!

Incidentally, even after restoring from a backup, I had to completely re-do my settings for my Adobe Exchange account (I'm guessing that the certificate for the phone can't be backed up). Also, although my setting for syncing an image directory on the MacBook Pro to the iPhone was still present, the image in the directory (I only have 1 image in that directory) was not on the iPhone until I did another sync and, because I use that image as my Wallpaper, I had to reset my Wallpaper after I synced the image back to the iPhone.

Without any implication that it's at all okay that Apple hasn't bothered to implement a Task List application on the iPhone, here's a method I thought up to emulate task lists using the Calendar application:

1. In your computer's Exchange client (you can't do it on the iPhone; you have to use Outlook or Entourage or whatever on your computer), create a new sub-directory of your current Calendar (and make sure you set it to be of the Calendar type). Call it Tasks.
2. Repeat the above step with the exception that this time call the sub-directory Completed Tasks.

Pretty simple, huh? So how do you use it? Well, when you enter the Calendar application on the iPhone, you'll be able to view the calendars for your Exchange account (when you're in the Calendar app looking at the main view, you should see in the upper left-hand corner a button labeled "Calendars" that will take you to view the calendars). You'll see that you can view just one calendar or all of your calendars; as you may also know, your main view choices include List--so you can choose to view the "Tasks" calendar and view it as a List, very much as you would expect to view tasks in a Task List application. And of course you add a new task by creating a new calendar item in the Tasks calendar.

Unfortunately, there's no way to designate a calendar item as complete; that's why I use the second calendar called Completed Tasks. But there's one more unfortunate thing (referenced in my iPhone 2.0 Insights blog post) that comes into play here: you can't move calendar items from one calendar to another on the iPhone. Totally inexplicable pain in the butt, but it isn't the end of the world to just move the items over on your computer (if you don't care about completed tasks, you can always just delete them on either the iPhone or your computer and not worry about the Completed Tasks calendar).

Using 2 directories and calling them "Tasks" and "Completed Tasks" is just my choice: obviously, you can change the names of the calendar sub-directories as you see fit and you can create more than just 2 if you'd like.

Note: this definitely works with iPhone synched up over the air with Exchange; it may or may not work in other configurations (all I can say is that prior to synching over the air with Exchange, I was not aware of any way to synch with multiple calendars nor to view multiple calendars on the iPhone).

Note: I am aware that there are 3rd party Task List applications available for iPhone, however, given that none of those are able to synch with Exchange, they do not suit my purposes. I also don't know if any of those can alert me like calendars items can.