My new iPhone 4 was absolutely a thing of beauty, until I followed the Apple upgrade advice. Now I don’t have one.
If you haven’t upgraded yours to allow for the silly bigger-bars-are-better thing, I advise against it.
After clicking on the install in iTunes, my two-week-old iPhone 4 went through all the gyrations of such an upgrade, then turned into a brick with a screen that advised me it was now in “Recovery Mode”. My new tool’s brains had been scrambled.

So, OK. No big deal, I thought; not much on the thing I can’t live without right now. Most of it’s backed up anyway. I’ll just do the recovery thing and all will be well.

Not so. The phone goes through the recovery process, but comes right back to the beginning of it, lifeless.
At this point, I had not yet discovered that jailbreakers sometimes experience a similar problem and have a solution at least proposed.

So I looked at Apple Support, went through all the steps that page suggested. Nada.

Being clueless about the whole thing, I finally set up a phone appointment with an Apple Expert. This, by the way, is a fantastic service. Basically, you can set up a time that’s convenient for you and Apple will call you at a number you specify. Great customer service (except for the fact that I actually needed it).

A woman called at the appointed time. She seemed to know what she was doing and hinted at a glimmer of hope when I told her the phone had showed two different errors: 2001, and 9. The former was not too bad to deal with, she said, but number 9 was “not as much fun.” Oh, oh.
She checked to see that I had, indeed, done everything possible to breath life into the phone, then declared it a lost cause and explained Apple would send a box. Pack it up and send it back, she said, and Apple will look at it and send a phone back.
Actually sending me a new phone first with a return box for the old one would cost money ($30, I think), but it wouldn’t speed things up because Apple is slammed for delivery on the phones anyway.

Interestingly, she admitted that Apple has indeed been getting calls about the iPhone 4 locking up like this on updates to IOS. I have seen nothing at all about this in the avid Apple press corps.

That’s where it stands. The old new phone went with FedEx this morning.

And I’m very cranky about the whole thing.

Update: Got the new phone back and all is well. It took one day to get it there, even from here (in the middle of nowhere). Apple took a thorough look at it and declared it dead. Shipped a new phone out same day. Got it the next day.

Now I have to decide if I will EVER update my phone’s OS again.