iPhone Problem

I had a weird iPhone problem crop up last night. My speaker audio stopped working. PigShooter, Piano, etc. would no longer play sound out the speaker. In fact, even the iPod and ringtones didn’t work - and yet playing a voicemail in speaker mode did work! It was really weird. I figured either I or some other third party app may have screwed something up, so I restored from 1.1.1 firmware fresh this morning - only it didn’t fix the problem.

That pretty much said to me that it must be some kind of a hardware problem and I’d probably have to replace it. As I was thinking about that, I thought of one other possible thing to try first. I rapidly plugged and unplugged the headphones and lo-and-behold it fixed it. Luckily my guess was correct - the little switch thing that’s often built into headphone jacks to detect the presence of a plug was apparently stuck or dirty or some-such and exercising it a bit fixed things up.

Yay for non-broken iPhones! :-)

4 Responses to “iPhone Problem”

  1. Jerry Says:

    Whoa! That was intense. My heart was in throat while I read that. I need to go meditate for a while after reading that, man.

  2. Sean Says:

    @Jerry: Oh, you know it. You should have been me! It was like… at least 1.5x more intense from my point of view. Whew.

  3. Jemand Says:

    Next time post your problems in your blog :)

    I have the same problem and was happy when I found out the solution (pluggin the headphones in and out).
    So everytime I used the headphones, I listen to the sound when I switch the iphone off. If there is no sound, I plug the headphones in and out and try again.

    I’ve never had any problems with my secondary headphones. Just the original apple headphones generate this error on my iphone.

  4. CrownOfThornz Says:

    Hey Sean, I had teh same exact problem happen to me. People were calling me and I would pick up and wouldn’t be able to hear them. It was like the headphones were plugged in but non-existent. It was crazy, I actually figured it out right away after plugging my headphones in and pulling them out once more just to see. It’s frustrating none-the-less. So I feel your pain bro.

    Click my name!