Last week I restored my iPhone via iTunes to iOS 6.1. Push email in iOS 5 had stopped working and overall the phone seemed buggy. Aside from needing to manually transfer my apps back to the phone and re-running 'restore from backup', everything went well.
Earlier this week I got tired of waiting months for an untethered version of iOS 6 jailbreak so I rolled the dice and ran redsn0w tethered. Okay, the problem with a tethered jailbreak is that anytime your device reboots, you have to plug it into a computer and re-run redsn0w to get things back to normal. Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that the user experience of a tethered jailbreak isn't generally up to par with that of an untether. Just because the dev-team releases a tethered jailbreak for an OS version doesn't guarantee that developers have gotten around to updating their apps, tweaks and themes to be compatible with that OS version. That lack of compatibility damn near ensures that your device will be rebooting more often than normal - thereby requiring you to stay within close proximity of a redsn0w-running computer.
To add insult to injury, there seem to be some new bugs inherent in iOS 6.1. Whatever it was in iOS 5 that was responsible for my Push email not working seems to have been fixed but now iOS 6 appears to have a bug that affects screen brightness. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Another unfortunate error, I made the mistake of assuming this screen brightness issue was related to jailbreaking so, combined with the app/tweak/theme compatibility issues mentioned above, I decided to go back to stock iOS 6.1
Now this is gonna sound like rambling but it's worth mentioning, so hang in there. I've restored enough iOS devices and run enough jailbreaks to know that iTunes needs access to the internet during a restore operation. Even if you've already downloaded the new firmware file to the computer beforehand, iTunes still needs to contact Apple's servers to basically make sure there isn't a newer version of the firmware available. I won't go into detail as to why Apple requires this step but suffice it to say that it's not entirely for the benefit of the customer. And while I understand there's supposed to be a way to trick iTunes into doing a restore without internet access, I've never had any luck with it.
One thing that I was unaware of however, is that iTunes also needs internet access again near the end of a restore operation. It would be very useful to customers if Apple mentioned this beforehand, especially if they're gonna continue giving us the option to 'just download' the update. The 'just download' option implies that one has the option to install the update at a more convenient time, perhaps somewhere in which internet access is not available. But as I learned the hard way - even after taking steps to ensure that I at least had internet access at the start of the restore - that is not the case.
What began as a simple restore operation turned into a temporarily-bricked phone. The problem was resolved easily-enough once I regained internet access but seeing as how this is primarily a communication device, there should be fair warning of the requirements for success.
