Unlocked iPhone sound system stopped working
Very annoying. Today I took two phones out with me. Busy day. Lots of meetings, first day back and what not.
I took out my fancy unlocked iPhone and my o2 Blackberry.
The Blackberry is email/data only £10/month. The phone doesn’t work. I didn’t want yet another phone number to deal with.
All was good until I answered a phone call in the early afternoon and couldn’t hear the other person. I then realised that no sound *whatsoever* was coming from the device. They, interestingly, could hear me. No sound, no music, no video, no alarm sound, no *phone* audio. Deary me.
That screwed me.
First day back and I had lots of calls to make and receive. SMS Text News reader Gaylene, from Hill & Knowlton, was a bit confused. I’d been trying to meet her but she was wondering why, every time she called, I didn’t answer and texted back. I ended up having to type an enormously embarrassing “hi, my iPhone’s audio has just stopped working, so, er, could you text me?” explanatory message.
Deeply, deeply unimpressed. Couldn’t use the Blackberry to call anyone, obviously. So I spent the whole afternoon texting. And surfing at the speed of slow. There is, perhaps, nothing worse than sitting using an iPhone fandabbydosey (”good”) browser next to a chap on a boring but 3G Samsung — and note that he’s getting better browsing speeds.
It is a seeeerious let down, the data speed. It’s even more annoying when you can’t use the handset’s primary function — voice.
Reflashed it with 1.1.3 and unlocked it again with ZiPhone and piff, paff, poof, the device is fine. But my confidence in Apple is chipped, ever so, ever so, ever so slightly chipped. How annoying. I hope it doesn’t happen again.
This experience, by the way, combined with a few other experiences today, pushed me into a Vodafone shop…
That’s happened to me too. You don’t need to restore everything though - The problem is that the iPhone thinks that the headphones/headset are still attached, and therefore disables the handset speaker. It most often happens if you’re using non-Apple headphones.
The solution, rather primitively, is to reattach the headphones, pushing the jack in quite firmly, and then pull it out again. Repeat until you get your sound back.
Clumsy I know - and one would expect better of apple. But I’ve had almost exactly the same thing happen on a Sony Ericsson too (although it had a way to manually override it).
Posted by Chris on March 1st, 2008 at 10:30 am.Ewan, just carry your N95 with Joiku on it. That and always carry a spare cell on important days.
Posted by Jeb on March 1st, 2008 at 6:56 pm.Hey,
I bet your SMS still worked. A great plug for SMSTextNews!
Seems like a great lead in to the wonderful uses of SMS. Like when your Blackberry goes down, guess what? Your SMS still works! Or in times of emergencies when the cell towers are all jammed up and you can’t get a call out…yup, SMS still works!
We need to remember more that SMS is there to help us in times of trouble on the network…
Posted by Giff Gfroerer, i2SMS on March 2nd, 2008 at 4:59 pm.Thanks Chris!
I actually tried that initially, to no avail. I continued plugging and unplugging and after 10 or so times it worked and the sound came back. I didn’t expect this from my iPhone… maybe because it’s unlocked.
Posted by Pat on March 5th, 2008 at 8:10 pm.