Restoring an iPhone that has been remotely wiped

My wife and I were at a St. Paul Saints ball game last night. It turned out to be a wet and stormy evening. Being in an open air ball park, we got pretty soaked from the showers. I became concerned that my iPhone would get wet in my pocket so I gave it to my wife to put in her purse for safe keeping. We left the game early in a downpour. When we got home, I asked her where she put her purse so I could retrieve my iPhone. She started to panic when she couldn't find it. It must have been dropped by the car in the parking lot. The purse contained everything you would expect including both of our phones. My first fear was that someone was going to get my personal information off of my iPhone. So I quickly logged into my .me account and performed a remote wipe of my iPhone. It would have been nice to be able to locate it with the "Find my iPhone" feature but I had never turned it on.

Fortunately, there are still many kind and honest people in this world and we received a phone message that arrived via email (a feature of our Vonage home phone service) from a woman who found the purse sitting in a puddle beside her car as she was leaving the game. (Thanks so much Cheryl). She informed us that she was leaving it with the stadium police who would hold it for us. As we rushed back down to the stadium in an ongoing downpour, I was appreciating the cool features of the iPhone and anticipating an easy restoration of my data of which I had just made a recent backup. When we finally got the purse and inspected my phone, I was surprised to see that not only was my phone wiped of all personal data, but the only thing it displayed was the Apple logo and it would not turn off! When we got home I plugged it into my MacBook to begin the restoring process. Nothing happened. By then my phone's battery was dead and all I saw was a dim charging icon. After about 10 minutes charging, the Apple logo came back but nothing else. The phone didn't show up as a device in iTunes. I tried to turn it off and on again multiple times but still nothing. Doing a google search on the subject led me to a couple of posts where people found the remote wipe action nearly bricked their phones. There wasn't much to be found that explained clearly how to get past where my phone was stuck. So trying different sequences of holding the power button and home button, I finally was able to get the screen to display the icon instructing me to plug the phone into the computer to restore from back up and the process began. As I recall, the sequence was 1.) Power down. 2.) Power up and hold the home button until the Apple logo changes to the plug into iTunes icon. After that it was a short amount of time until my iPhone was completely restored.

I am thrilled with the iPhone and all the well-thought-through features. The only downside of the experience was that I was very close to having to upgrade to the 3GS version and will have to wait out my AT&T contract on my first generation iPhone. "Just kidding, honey!"