restoring iphone from the Cloud

My 6mo old iPhone 6 started to become unresponsive to my swiping and unable to see wifi the day before I left for a long trip to Asia (where I intended to use a mifi). The genius bar was all booked up but a telephone support person walked me through go to " Settings" then "General" and scroll all the way to the bottom to "Reset" which removed all my passwords. That got the phone working again.

Once we got to Korea, I was taking a lot of photos and the battery drained to 50% after a half hour. Fortunately I carried external battery chargers with me. As soon as I landed back in the US, I made a genius bar reservation. I tried to do it from Korea but, even though I was on the US Apple site, it would throw me to the Korean site to book a reservation.

The genius showed me a menu where I could look up power data use and 22% was looking for a cell signal, even though I had turned cell data off. He said that the best way to use "wifi only" was to put it on airplane mode, but then turn the wifi on. Good tip, but my husband, who was with me on the trip, had the exact phone bought the same day and his battery never drained. The genius said that, since I had multiple serious issues, he would give me a brand new iPhone (not refurbished) and send the old one back to be dissected by the engineers. Sweet! I backed it up to iCloud right then, erased my old phone and handed it over. He told me that it would take a couple hours to restore the phone so I could do that at home. He made sure it turned on OK and then I went home.
I started the setup process, but everything went wonky. First, it only gave me access to a backup from September when I had IOS 9.02 which is all this phone had installed. The other backups were all greyed out.  When I went to update the software, it asked me to put in my iCloud password but kept saying that the login had failed. It knew I was logged in because the first thing it loaded was my Apple Pay credit card. I entered the password about 15 times before I gave up and called phone support. They told me to turn off "Find my iPhone" because that prevents you from fixing the phone. Then I had to login at iCloud.com on my laptop (had no idea this site existed). At  this point it sent me to just some information pages with no "continue" or "start" buttons to be seen. The telephone guy went to get the supervisor. In the meantime I navigated backwards and logged out, logged back in, then a new button appeared to let me see the icons on the page that he had described. ( I just went to icloud and now the icons show up immediately after login. They were only available last night after a button showed up under the login) The supervisor showed up and I allowed him to see my screen so, if this issue popped up again, he could deal with it. I clicked on "Find my iPhone" then on erase my phone. Then I had to plug my phone into my laptop to upgrade to IOS 9.1 which he said would be far faster than updating over wifi. He said that that ios incompatibility with the backups is a common problem with restoring new phones. *I wish they would put this on the support page.*  He showed me a little icon in the upper right which started at 12 hours left to download but speeded up. This took a very long time- over 30 minutes. I let the phone support guy hang up after 5 minutes so he wouldn't have to wait around and I had been on the phone with him almost an hour. It became stalled at 8 minutes left for a long time and I was just typing a note to the support guy, when it woke up and started to crawl along again.
However, there was a new problem. The phone had now taken the nickname identity of my laptop which is not the same name I use for my phone. So even though all the icloud email and passwords were compatible, it would not let me restore my phone. I was going crazy! Finally I thought to erase my phone again. That allowed it to find its true name and allow the backup! Success! Almost. I went to bed believing that I was restoring. However, when I woke up, I found that it had not loaded mail, calendar, facebook or any purchased apps because I had to put my password in.
This was pretty frustrating. Nothing seemed straight forward. Why was it just ignoring my logins? Why didn't the correct pages show up on icloud? Why did it take on my nickname from my laptop? I would expect that I could use my son's laptop to update the software without it taking on his identity.
The moral of this story is, that you have to erase the phone repeatedly to fix it. So make sure you have it backed up.