I got in this morning and decided to update my iPhone to the 2.0 software. I plugged it into the laptop, fired up iTunes, went to the iPhone screen and said check for update. iTunes said there weren’t any? A minute or so later a screen pops up asking if I want to update the software. I said yes and it started the download, it made its backup, proceeded with the update, and then it refuses to restore my phone. I am looking at a screen in iTunes that has my phones name listed as iPhone (which is not what it was) and a big error message that says “We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-9838). There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please Try again later.” The phone shows a picture of a USB cable pointing at an iTunes icon and is only able to be used in the emergency call form. I am sitting on hold with Apple support in the hope that they will be able to straighten this out. I have seen no reports of this in any of the searches I did before calling support. I hope this doesn’t happen to anyone else.

Also, a search of my hard drive for files modified or created today did not return anything that resembles what I would think of as and iPhone backup. I get three Excel files I worked on and an iCal file.

Edit: A nice support rep named Chris told me I was the fifth person to call with the problem and that the engineer he spoke with said there was really nothing to be done until the iTunes crew fixed whatever the issue is. Hard reboot of the phone just gives the same USB pointing at iTunes screen. I was able to give Chris the error code so maybe that will help.