I don’t know why I do it. Why do I always get suckered into believing that software updates are always going to make things better? Maybe it’s my experience and perspective as a developer, which is that if you’re fixing stuff to put out in a patch or an update then whatever it is you’re updating is always going to somehow end up better.

Unfortunately that just isn’t the case. Twice in the last week I’ve fallen into this trap, once with SmartAssembly, which since Red Gate bought it seems to be going downhill fast (I found three serious flaws within ten minutes of using v5), and now more seriously with iOS4.

I’m not a gullible man, so I don’t buy into the hype that guys like Steve Jobs spout when they’re announcing things to the world, but I am a believer that large companies are going to put time and effort into testing things thoroughly before chucking them out the door for the great unwashed. That’s what you’d like to think anyway.

So when iOS4 was announced, I dutifully plugged in my iPhone 3GS to iTunes and let rip at the upgrade process. ten minutes later all I had to show for that was an error message telling me that something had gone wrong and I had to do it all again.

So nervously I kicked it off again, and within about 30 minutes or so, I was back up and running. Sporting a shiny new iOS4, or at least so I thought, until I got a call.

Within about 60 seconds of being in a call the phone completely locked up. When I looked at the screen all I had showing was a shiny Apple logo. No matter what buttons I pushed all I could see was the logo. Finally it decided to boot back up, as if nothing had happened.

Well, the first time it happened I thought nothing of it really as these things happen. However a week later I can tell you that it’s not just one of those things because now it’s happening all the time. Randomly during calls the whole phone will lock itself up and be about as much use as a three inch floppy disk drive.

To put it bluntly, this is piss poor. What good is a phone on which you can’t make calls?

Oh well, that’s OK I thought, I can just roll it back to one of my backups. Yeah, dream on. That option isn’t a reality. Once you enter the world of iOS4 there’s no going back.

So this morning I did a bit of a search around and found out that I am far from the only one with this issue. A look at a post on the Apple Discussion board revealed a thread with nearly 20,000 visitors in one week. Seems I’m not alone.

There seems to be no official answer from Apple yet, but if anybody’s ready this: SORT IT OUT.

Despite my dad’s best efforts to drag me along to see Bristol Rovers play when I was a kid, football never grabbed me, but nowadays as an adult, when a hi-stakes game is on it’s (generally) an interesting watch, and the stakes have never been higher for England than their do or die match against Slovenia this Wednesday.

But with a 15:00 kick-off it’s pretty much a given that a pretty big chunk of England’s working population will be either pulling a sickie (or if their employer has any sense – watching the match in work on a supplied TV set). But what happens if you’re going to be out and about?

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