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Saturday, July 7, 2007
Today my iPhone did what my Pocket PC/Windows Mobile phone would do three or four times a day: lock up. I was surfing a web site on Safari and it just locked up. (Later on my Mac, I learned that the site is a full Flash site. Mmm, Apple’s handling that lack of Flash well.) The phone would not respond to the home button nor the on/off button. Holding in the off button for a long period of time still rendered my iPhone a brick. Nothing. Fortunately, I had just read how to soft-reset the iPhone a couple of days ago, so I applied the Apple support trick. Sure enough, after a long seven second count (I used 1, 1,000, 2, 2,000 count instead of the Mississippi one), my iPhone went black and there in the middle of the screen was the Apple logo. Woo hoo! It worked.
Now, I don’t expect perfection from any company but I’ll tell you, a week before something triggered my iPhone into brick mode is very impressive when you’ve used Microsoft gear for nearly ten years. 
I’m sure when that rumored Flash update hits the phone, then even this won’t be an issue.
July 8th, 2007 at 7:46
If Flash comes to iPhone, not when. iPhone supports open web standards. Adobe’s Flash is no open standard. Apple is trying to avoid being dependent on proprietary plugins.
July 8th, 2007 at 9:18
If you want to see a MacbookPro ’s fans go into overdrive, visit a bad Flash site. I can totally understand why Apple avoided it on the iPhone and I’m not sure they’ll ever include it. As Alan mentioned, web standards are the direction they’re headed.
You might find this of interest…
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q3.07/F793A972-337D-4CBB-AA4A-2F787E6E861E.html
July 8th, 2007 at 15:00
Flash isn’t really much of an issue for me; but, anyway –
Apple posted a video demonstration of this reset procedure (short as it is
) at their iPhone section. It’s the tenth video under “Finger Tips.”
July 8th, 2007 at 16:10
according to Walt Mossberg, Flash is on the way for the iPhone.
As to the iPhone supporting open standards, last I checked, QuickTime isn’t open and it is in Safari on the iPhone.
July 8th, 2007 at 18:01
Actually, the QuickTime plugin will not support most quicktime. What it will support is the MPEG-4 H.264 standard, supported by other plugins like real and Windows Media. It does not support any proprietary Apple video CODECs
July 20th, 2007 at 8:27
Mine turned brick with while reading an email. I figured out to hold both the power and the bottom button together for a few seconds and it reboots.
I do want to comment that I too have used the windows based treo 700w for a year and have probably had to reboot it 10 times per month (conservatively). I’ve had the iPhone for 2 weeks and have had to once so the numbers look good…HOWEVER…I can’t stand that I can’t load anything to the iPhone…
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:55
I trid the above and it did not work, I had to hold the on-off buttun and the button on the lower front at the same time to reset it,
August 22nd, 2007 at 15:58
I also had to hold the on-off button and the button on the front of the unit in order for it to reset. Thanks
September 20th, 2007 at 16:39
My first iPhone lasted a week an a half before having issues. The phone would only last 4 hours with only 5 minutes of talk, and a couple of text messages. Then completely dead by lunch time. Useless. This happend while my wife was on a business trip.
Today we went to the Apple store on the way home from the airport. Over an hour of waiting to see the Apple Geek, and he said he would swap the phone since it was so new. Great. Halfway home on the hour drive, the phone locked up. Could still see the icons, but the backlight turned off. Wouldn’t respond to any buttons. Locked up.
Got home, read about doing the soft reset. Tried that, got the Apple icon, nothing more. Charged it, did a sync on the computer, and got it to reload the software, but the display on the phone never changed from the Apple logo. No amount of resetting or resyncing gets it past the Apple blue screen of death. See for yourself:
http://2manytoyz.com/hardware/bluescreeniphone.jpg
Making an appointment for a 3rd phone in 10 days. If the replacement fails, I’ll be looking for a refund. It’s a fantastic product when it works. But a very expensive paperweight when it doesn’t. Reliability factor to have as a safety device is zero right now.
September 21st, 2007 at 16:16
Update:
After several hours of sitting on charge with only the Apple icon, I was finally able to get it to shut down (only took a few hundred tries).
After that, I was able to sync it with iTunes. But unfortunately, the phone was still locked, even though the data did transfer. Now had the default factory load. So tried the backup restore to her last phone. Data transferred, phone still locked. An hour on the phone with Apple, they said it’s an AT&T problem now. An hour on the phone with AT&T, and the changed the account to match the new iPhone S/N with the sim card. All should work now. Just do another sync. Nope.
So I wiped iTunes from the computer, did a reload, then tried another factory restore. No go. Still locked. Many attempts and variations, no joy.
Stopped by AT&T on the way home today with the paperweight. Kid working there looked like a deer in the headlights. He did try to read the sim card by putting in a card reader on his computer. Didn’t work. He claimed it was likely due to it being an Apple product… but the sim card looked like every other sim card they use, with even the same logo.
Another 30 minutes go by, nobody there knew what to do. Finally they called an AT&T tech number. The lady listened to the long story, and all the attempts to fix. It looked like the phone was working, but not logging into the AT&T network. She said this topic had been discussed at her office only yesterday. Put me on hold to discuss the issue, came back and said bad sim card. I agreed.
The AT&T office grabbed a new sim card, matched it to our account, installed it, and said to sync when we get home.
Fingers crossed…
It came up as a new phone, had to do the full registration again. Worked perfectly. Software talked to the phone, logged into the AT&T network, downloaded her contacts, songs, favorites, etc.
Now works perfectly. Now food for thought. Maybe the battery issue could have been caused by a bad sim card? Maybe the lock up on the way home was caused by this same bad sim card transferred to the new phone? No doubt the sim card prevented the new phone from logging into the network last night. I believe they might all be related.
Something to consider when you’ve exhausted everything else. Hope the new setup continues to work well. Wife has had ENOUGH.
September 21st, 2007 at 22:16
Robert, good to hear that it finally worked out. Your story made me think of how Apple/Steve Jobs has said that the ability to “control the whole widget” enables them to provide better product support. Pretty lame of the kid in the AT&T store to start assuming that it was a bad Apple SIM card (or whatever hairbrained idea he had).
FWIW, I don’t own an iPhone (yet), but one of my coworkers has had his since June 30th, and it’s still working great.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:50
In the nearly three months I have had the iPhone it locked up once, and for no good reason. I wasn’t doing anything! It was on the call log screen and just froze up. The soft boot worked fine. Every now and again the phone hangs on a screen for a few seconds. But besides that, and the short battery life, it works great.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:11
hi foacks
i get a software from the ziphone i isntall the version 2.6
and it have so many things amazings things.
well i hack my iphone
and it dosent work any more
i turn in on and only apears
the logo of the apple and after a few minutes
it make flash white and black thats it
it really sucks
i plug the usb and i reset my iphone so many times
and it dosent work anymore
so a suggestion do not install any software from any web site
is cool but at the same time you loose your iphone./
so please let me know what can i do for it!!!!
April 9th, 2008 at 14:15
@Jairo,
Install ZiPhone 3.0
Choose the “reviriginize” feature, which will wipe your iPhone back to the begining…
Then try again
That should fix any issues you might have had…