In all the time I have owned mobile phones (since 1990 I think; and yes it dates me) I have never lost one. As the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end, right? As it happens, I am travelling internationally and made the mental error of putting my phone down on a street vendor's cart and walking away. By the time I realized my mistake, the phone was long gone.

Since I own an iPhone, I was able to run location trace and found the phone had traveled quite a distance in a short amount of time. I made my way to the last known location and it turned out to be a dense grove of trees. It seems the thief had sped there, stopped there, removed the SIM and powered down the phone. It was a painful moment knowing I just lost an expensive piece of electronic equipment through sheer complacency.

Anyway, I called the service provider and disabled the SIM. Then I contacted the insurance company to report the phone stolen, and lastly had my service suspended in the US just in case.

Next on the agenda was another phone. Since the insurance company will not ship internationally my shiny replacement phone is sitting at home. Luckily, the mobile phone market is very different here. You buy phones at full retail (cheaper for used phones of course), and the resale market is also strong. There are no contracts to sign and rates are dirt cheap from the service providers. I can actually call the US from my mobile phone for $0.01 per minute. Yes, that's one cent.

So what does all this have to do with iTunes? Quite a bit actually. The replacement phone I bought has less storage than my original phone, and when I synced the new phone I got an "over capacity" error message. This meant I needed to lessen the weight, so to speak. First thing I did was take off all the music except the songs on my playlists. Next I started deleting app from the newly synced phone and since it was going to take me a while (I had 350 apps) I disconnected the phone from the laptop.

Once I had deleted a majority of the apps, I reconnected to iTunes and synced. iTunes decides to reinstall all the deleted apps. What?! Repeated the process, same result. Gah! Don't have that many hair to pull out. I visited a lot of blogs and none of the answers helped. Then I accidentally discovered the solution, so here it is, in case any of you face the same issue.

- Connect iPhone

- Allow iTunes to sync iPhone.

- Ignore the "over capacity" message if you get it and let the sync complete.

- Turn off "sync automatically" option in iTunes.

- While connected, delete the apps you did not want on the iPhone

- "Sync" button on bottom right of iTunes screen changes to "Revert" and "Apply"

- Hit "Apply"

- All the Apps you had deleted on the iPhone disappear from iTunes right hand side display, which emulates iPhone screens.

- Hit "Sync"

- All's well in Happy Valley

So, in the end, I hope my trials and tribulations help you avoid the same frustrations.

But really, don't lose your phone.