1st gen iPhone showing up in iTunes as blank window

So, I have a friend who has a 1st gen iPhone...  iTunes said to her "there's a new version of iOS available, would you like to download it and upgrade?"...  She was feeling particularly good about life and decided, yes!  I will upgrade!
The download happened, and the install happened, and her phone became a dead brick.  She called 1-800-my-apple, and they told her "1st gen iPhones can't handle the latest OS, there's nothing that can be done and you have to go buy a new phone".
Gee...  You'd think Apple engineers might have their OS update installers do a device version check to make sure it can actually support the OS it's asking you to install..  Maybe that's just too much to ask for?  I don't know--- Anyway, this was really disturbing for me to hear as I couldn't imagine Apple doing something so irresponsible and short-sighted to their users.  I know someone here is going to reply to this with "dude it's a first gen iphone.. get a new phone", but that's not the point.  The point is, Apple should know what their devices can and can't handle and not just screw over people who happen to not be in the financial position to upgrade their hardware.
Anyway, so, I happened to have a 1st gen iPhone that I was not doing anything with, so I offered to send it to her so she could have a working phone.  I sent her instructions on how to swap her sim card, and so she did that.. and reported to me that after plugging in the phone her itunes shows this:
No options to restore her previous iPhone backups.. nothing..  I tried googling around for this, but found very little information so I thought I'd ask here.  Does anyone know why her iTunes is showing a blank window?  She installed the latest version (10.5 build 141)...  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
-patrick

I'm in the same boat.  My mother uses my old 1st Gen iPhone as an ipod, and it suddenly stopped syncing music, so I did a restore, and now it just gives me the connect to iTunes screen, but when I do I get the same blank iPhone screen inside itunes.

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