Lotusphere is always something special … and not being at Lotusphere is always a bit sad. Unfortunately LS2006 was the last I attended in person in Orlando.

Whenever possible I followed the bloggers on-site through the week and especially the Opening General Session (OGS) … but of course it’s not the same as being there.

This time IBM offered a live stream of the OGS and it was a great experience. It eases the pain of not being there a little bit. And it was fun to interact with those being in Orlando as well as with some of the over 1,200 viewers of the livestream.

Sitting at a Munich Starbucks and being directly connected to a live event happening in Orlando … another example how small the world became today and what technologie can do nowadays.

Regarding the OGS itself I have mixed feeling. Michael J. Fox was a great speaker. Kudos for IBM’s choice this year. It was somewhat sad to see his current condition and what Parkinson had done with this great actor … but it was inspiring at the same time how he challenges himself. I’m not sure if I would be able to speak in front of several thousand people under that circumstances!

In regards of the products: IBM Connections Next looked very impressive. But for Notes / Domino it becomes clear that the product is alive and in good condition but without adding connections you definately are missing the cake. To get full value of what the next-family is offering Connections is a “must have”. And I am not sure if I am really happy about that.

The cat is out of the bag in terms of names: The next version of Notes/Domino will be called Notes / Domino Social Edition. I am fine with that “official” name but still curious what the “street name” will be. Still smells a bit like Buzzword Bingo added to a product name ;-)

But renaming “Lotus Live” into “IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business” is a bit weired. I agree with @EdBrill that “Smart Cloud Engage” isn’t that bad but why not sticking with “IBM Smart Cloud” for the product line. That’s what the people will call it anyway. Adding “Social Business” is just Buzzword Bingo, too!

I am sure the attendees of Lotusphere 2012 will explore a lot of great stuff … and also this was a good overall OGS I missed the “There’s one more thing” that’s really exciting.

Notes/Domino is far away from being dead or killed. I think it’s like the new black backpacks for the LS 2012 attendees. There may be only black outside … but there’s a lot of yellow inside ;-)

(backpack picture found at: http://noteshexe.de/blog/?p=2012)

My iCloud restore experience … it wasn’t planned to test the iCloud that early but well, situations like that mostly happen when you don’t expect them.

I’m not sure what went wrong in the first place but after downloading some music on the iPad and doing a sync with iTunes those new tunes refused to work. Even worse, I had some tunes just playing the next title instead. A total mess - but only on the iPad. Everything was fine on iTunes and the iPhone.

Tried to sync a few times but couldn’t get it fixed. Then I made a big mistake: Instead of just unmarking music sync in iTunes, syncing one time and then marking it again, I removed the playlists on the iPad. Very big mistake. Of course the deletions synchronised to iTunes and now my playlists had been gone. Was able to recreate them from a backupfile that wasn’t too old but still had the problem that the music was messed up on the iPad.

Therefore it was time for a restore. I do iCloud backup and my newest backup was from last night (less than 18 hours old). I had all the new purchased titles already on iTunes and the iPhone so I gave it a shot.

The restore process via iCloud is great, it definately “just works”! No cables just answering a few questions (location services, wlan, Agrrement etc.) and then you tell your device to restore from the last backup.

The settings and all the basic stuff (including the folders and the app bodys) is there immediately. Of course it takes some time to restore all the apps (about 2 hours for me) but that’s no problem. As soon as an app is fully loaded you can use it. The load process goes from the first app/folder on your home screen to the last. So if you have your most important apps in front those will be loaded first and you’re immediately ready to continue working with your device.

While the process is great in general you have to keep some things in mind:

• Only music from the iTunes store is included in the backup. So if you have digitalised CD’s or music from other sources don’t get rid of your PC. You have to sync with iTunes at the end to get them back!

• Videos in the photo app aren’t part of the photostream. Therefore they are not part of the backup either. Lost four videos that way. Not a big deal in that case but a thing to remember. Put them on dropbox or some other place before restoring. O.K., I was wrong on this! Apparently they are not put back into the self created folders but they are still part of the backup and can be found in the Standard or Imported folder. So I just had to add them back to their appropriate folders. Good news! :-)

• Same is of course valid for any data from apps that don’t support iCloud. If you want to know which apps are storing documents & data for the backup just check “General - Usage” (weird location as I rather would expect it in the iCloud section)

So beside those small hickups this was a nice way to recreate my device. And the music titles in question started to work again. Unfortunately my playlist problems still remained so I had to empty the music on my iPhone too. This time I made it in the right order … but (yes, this was a bad day yesterday!) after enabling music again my PC went down with a bluescreen about 5 minutes before the final sync was finished. Now the iPhone seems to be in a sync-loop and it looks like I have to get a restore there too.

Anyway, I would definately reccommend to use iCloud backup rather than iTunes backup. Just use common sense to ask yourself which stuff should be stored seperately … just in case ;-) 

Connection problems with the iPhone 4 solved (at least for me)!

Not sure if this is mostly a german problem but it seems that a number of people in all german mobile networks (O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone) have problems with network access on their iPhones with 3G (UMTS).

It all started with some news that this problem has hit a good number of people with the new iPhone 4S but as for now it seems more that it’s a problem with iPhones using iOS5 (and especially if you have used your SIM-Card before already).

People are reporting that they have bad 3G data coverage and some say that even making phone calls doesn’t work. Not much from Apple on that topic so far but T-Mobile says it’s the SIM-Card and replaces thoses from a particular series with newer ones.

No word from O2 and Vodafone. Unfortunately I am on O2 (using an iPhone 4) and ran into that problem too. Interestingly all worked fine after I upgraded to iOS5 at first … but looking back it seemed that the quality of reception went down a bit each day until my phone became more or less unresponsive two days ago in regards of data connection.

At first I used the published workaround to delete the SIM-PIN, restart the phone and switch to EDGE. That helped indeed to be connected again but wasn’t a satisfying solution at all (despite the reduced speed I don’t feel comfortable running a phone without SIM-PIN!).

So I went to the next O2 store but wasn’t much surprised that they blamed Apple and said they can’t do anything. Telling them about the SIM-Card change T-Mobile is doing they said that doesn’t help but still gave me a new one to replace my old card.

Back home I opened the envelope and was quite surpised as the card looks very different. The picture above shows my old card on the left and the new one (with a much bigger chip) on the right. So it is definately a different series. Called O2 customerservice and they designated my phone number to the new card. One hour later it was active and I started a first test.

While I only have EDGE inside I went out on the terrace but had to disable and enable 3G as well as data once before the phone switched back to 3G. Opened the Facebook app (which had huge problem to load at all before) … and it displayed the data in a second.

The next morning I used my iPad (tethered with my phone) during the whole one hour train trip into Munich without any problems. That trip goes through areas with quite bad 3G reception and it was fine all time. The last days I was more or less without access while riding the train. But it even seemed to be better reception than before with iOS4. No problems here in the office too (were I also experienced severe connection loss the last days).

So it seems that the SIM card change solved the problem for me. In case you have similar problems I definately would reccomend that you should give it a try. Don’t know if it works for everybody … but there’s not much you have to lose but a lot you could gain!