25 Jul iPhone Woes and Oddball Fixes
So, the iPhone 2.0 software upgrade has brought mixed feelings across the board… here are a few things that have happened to me.
I have to rail on AT&T a bit. Sometimes, this stuff just doesn’t make sense. When they say more bars, sometimes I think they mean “more different signal levels per minute than any other cell carrier.”
It started last year when I was traveling a lot. I was on a contract in Weehawken, NJ, which Google Maps will show you is right across the Hudson River from NYC. In NYC, the signal is strong, even amongst the tall buildings. Four to five bars everywhere and the EDGE is snappy.
However, across the river, less than a mile away, in NJ, the signal is a roller coaster of pain. Four bars. Five bars. No signal. One bar. No signal. Five bars. And that was all in the span of a few seconds. Calls are dropped frequently in that cell-signal nexus. And forget trying to do anything that requires EDGE. It’s slow and it will drop out before you get downloaded whatever it was you were trying to get.
I experienced the same phenomenon recently in Maine. The house I was in, for some reason, had the signal bouncing up and down in the same manner. Go outside, and it starts to settle down, around 3-4 bars. But inside, it’s crazy to the point that it’s useless. It may as well be No Signal.
Fixing the iPhone
Okay, since I was traveling (see the Maine part above), I was using my iPhone’s iPod functionality more than usual. No big deal, it’s great for such things. However, upon my return, I had a huge panic.
For some reason, my iPhone got it into its head that the earphones were plugged in, even when they weren’t. This has all sorts of bad implications. For instance, with the earphones plugged in, the phone won’t ring (it sends the ring to the earphones). As well, even if you happen to notice that your phone is ringing (say, it vibrates, or you happen to be looking directly at it), you can’t answer the call without the earphones. You could place the call on speaker, but that’s hardly a great solution.
I tried a barrage of things to get the iPhone to think that the earphones weren’t plugged in. Going to the settings, if I changed the ringer volume, then it would think that the earphones were no longer plugged in. But as soon as anything tried to use the speaker (iPod, an app, anything), bingo! back to the phantom earphones.
I stopped by my local Apple Store, but the soonest I could make an appointment with the “geniuses” was 2 days later. Well, I am on-call 24/7/365, so I need a phone that will ring and wake me up! So I stormed out of the store just as my girlfriend called me. But by the time I could get the earphones (which were in my hand since I was going to demonstrate to the “geniuses” what was happening) plugged in, she abandoned the call thinking I was either busy or away from my phone.
In any case, I got home and started trying everything. Factory reset (which, BTW, takes a looooooong time). No dice. Restore. Similar (non-)result.
So how did I fix it? A Q-Tip. That’s right. I took a Q-Tip and peeled away most of the cotton swabbing from one end. Then I sprayed a little electronics-safe screen-cleaner on the remaining cotton part and stuck it in the earphone jack. Voila! My iPhone’s worked fine ever since.
I guess something had gotten in there and was making a connection, forcing the iPhone to think earphones were plugged in.
So that’s my (Q-)Tip for the day!
Back to the woes
In the meantime, there are droves of complaints about the new iPhone 2.0 software being buggy and unstable. I can’t disagree. Apps bomb constantly. Sometimes they full-on reset the phone. Rarely does it have an issue with the standard apps, but the new Apps Store apps can crash the iPhone very frequently. And some at very inopportune times. One App tracks financial transactions. While setting up a new account, it frequently dumps back to the home screen, leaving a half-set-up account. So you have to delete it and start over.
Oh, another little bug that I found, that had an odd fix. I recently started using BusySync to sync up my iCal and my Google Calendar. Excellent app! Not free, but it’s like $20. I am definitely buying this one.
But right after I started using BusySync, my iPhone refused to sync the calendar. It just spun its wheels right there, as if in a loop.
So I did some research (apparently, this is a common problem), but the answer seemed to lie in iSync, the OSX application that syncs your Mac with your .Mac (now MobileMe) account. Well, I don’t have a .Mac account, so I decided that this fix wasn’t for me.
It turns out that it was. Go into iSync and go to the preferences and reset the sync. Suddenly, several “conflicts” popped up, which I resolved, and bingo! Everything is now working normally again.
In the end, the one thing that Apple really tried to do with the iPhone, which is to make it easy to use and accessible to near-luddites, they seem to have failed at miserably. It really takes a good deal of fussing, fidgeting, and know-how to keep an iPhone running well. Too bad.
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