My wife has an iphone 5. Has magically stopped working.

Question

One night it was working fine, the next morning it would not connect to her service provider, it would just be stuck in a "searching" mode.  We took it to the cell phone service provider, they said to update to the new iOS.  OK, we did that, then at the end of the install, it stopped worked, wouldn't install.  now the phone didn't work at all.  Did a restore in itunes, got all the way to the end of the update bar, then it won't get off that screen, after 20-30 minutes itunes gives me an unknown error message.  I took it into an apple store, the genius said it looked like a hardware failure.  I asked if this happens often, he said it was pretty rare.  As he was telling me this, he also mentioned that someone else sitting at the same table was going through the exact same problem.  When I turn on the phone I just get the connect to itunes message, but when I do restore won't finish.  The phone is only 1 year and 2 months old, was kept in an otter box, no damage or scratches on it, no liquid damage.  Now I'm being told I need to basically buy another phone as the solution.  How is that standing behind your products?  Also, I have been googling about and have noticed other people seem to have had this EXACT same issue.  First the phone is looking for service provider, but wifi and apps work.  Then they try to upgrade to this new ios and the phone ends up in the same condition as my wife's.  For a "rare" occurrence this seems to be happening to other people, and their phones all seem to be turning into hundred dollar paperweights when they try to install this new iOS.
Has anyone found a solution to this that isn't "buy a new phone for hundreds of dollars?"  If this was isolated to her phone that might be one thing.  But since someone was sitting in the store with the exact same problem, and people online seem to be reporting the same issue, I have to thing this wasn't just a fluke occurrence, and i'm wondering why it's suddenly my responsibility to buy a brand new phone when all we tried to do was update to the new iOS, as recommended, to fix the issue?
Thanks for any help or information people can pass along.

Answer 1

Why can't you use her ID? My wife, my daughter and I all use my Apple ID.
Go to Settings>Store>Apple ID and try to sign in there with her ID. Make sure that you are entering all of the information (password) correctly.
If you really want to create a new Apple ID - use your own email address, but I would recommend using only one ID anyway.