A bit of back-story is required for my update experience was unique. And I’ll tell you now that it’s not all that exciting. However – you will definitely appreciate it if you, like me, have your iPhone away from the home office computer that you’ve got it synced with.

I have been rocking my PowerBook G4 for almost 3 years now, but fianally upgraded to a Quad Core Mac Pro about two months ago. Since then, the Mac Pro has (obviously) been my main machine.

Having two macs necessitated a subscription to .Mac, which in turn made my .Mac username the Chief Potentate of all my accounts with Apple – including iTunes. And I haven’t bought a song of iTunes using my PowerBook since I got the Mac Pro and changed everything over to my .Mac account.

On Thursday, Apple released the next big software, firmware and feature update for iPhone. However, I am currently out of town toting around my PowerBook which is not the computer I used to setup, activate and sync my iPhone with.

Also, many of the songs and videos on my iPhone are not on my PowerBook and it would be a shame to sync, and lose them for the weekend. However, I decided to go for it anyway and see what would happen.

I connected my iPhone to my PowerBook and opened iTunes. I have automatic sync turned off so nothing would start without my permission. Without manually syncing the iPhone I simply clicked on “Software Update”.

The new update – 1.1.1 – downloaded and installed itself seamlessly without ever syncing my songs, videos, photos, etc…

Now that I had access to the iTunew Wi-Fi Music Store I tried to buy a song, however my iPhone was set-up with my old iTunes username with no way to change it from iPhone’s settings.

Realizing that I probably still had that username logged in on my PowerBook I logged out and re-logged-in with my new username. Then, I only had to plug in my iPhone, let iTunes see it, eject it and wala. The username was updated on my iPhone.

I never had to sync, or authenticate, or anything. Just plug it it and let iTunes do the rest. And that, my friends, is good news for anyone who doesn’t like to wait for things.