Ok so as this seems to be the most popular entry in my blog I thought I’d write a short follow-up. The unknown error on the iPhone 3g “Unknown Error: 0xE800002E” was an issue with updating applications from the Apple App store. The error occurs when there seems to be some conflict between the old app and the updated version and iPhone just spit back an “Unknown Error: 0xE800002E” and refused to let the app to load unless you unloaded it and reloaded the new applications.

The problem with this method, of course, is that all data within that application was then lost. After dealing with this issue of losing my data I decided to simply reset the whole iPhone and start from scratch.

Here’s my final solution to the “Unknown Error: 0xE800002E” problem and data loss for re-installation of applications.

Plug you phone and do a complete reset. If you’ve got the latest update to the iPhone software and you’ve been doing regular backups (common) just revert to the latest version while resetting your phone. This seemed to clear up all issues and there was very little data loss if any as all information was stored in the latest backup.

Ever since I did a full reset I haven’t gotten the error at all.