So at first I thought it might be pocket lint. You know, a nice good ball of blue and white lint that got stuck in the earphone jack, but after troubleshooting with the help of many websites and YouTube videos (like the one below), I realized we had a bigger problem here than I thought. What am I talking about you ask? My wife’s iPhone, that wonderful little device that we love for so many reasons (many of them having nothing to do with the phone part) stopped working properly a couple of months ago. Her earpiece went dead and she could only hear people talking if she put her phone on speakerphone.
After a little research I found out that this problem is quite common. The phone gets stuck in “earphone mode” and thinks that earphones are plugged into it, hence it sends no sound to the earpiece. Here are the few solutions that I came across in my attempts to fix this annoying issue:
1. Plug and unplug your iPhone headphones (repeat 7 or 8 times as needed)
2. Clean your iPhone headphone jack with the stick part of a Qtip (cut with a scissor) and dipped in Windex
3. Adjust your proximity sensor settings
4. Turn your phone of and on; make sure Bluetooth is off; restore factory settings
5. Restore firmware and reboot the phone (most drastic)
Even after trying all of these “solutions” my wife’s phone is still stuck in earphone mode. Even #5 didn’t work (I thought maybe b/c the phone is jail broken/unlocked that restoring the IPSW would help – nope). Is the speaker just broken? Do I need to return the phone to Apple (that means a trip to the US b/c the two Apple stores here in Israel don’t even have iPhones yet)? Does anyone have any other suggestions?
2 Comments
January 1, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Hi Mike
Given that all of the above hasn’t worked, I think it’s time to take the phone back to Apple… I’d try the stores in Israel first – you might just find they’re happy/able to help…
January 24, 2010 at 3:19 am
[...] is a known, occasional problem with the iPhone. If it happens to you, attorney Mike Mintz has some good advice on his Mintz's Wordz blog of the steps that you can take to try to solve the [...]