Iphone Problems and FIxes

I can't tell you how much I treasure my iPhone. Once you get the hang of it, it's very tough to put it down. However, it's definitely not perfect. Here are some tips I've learnt from experience. Hopefully it'll help because the net is THE place for troubleshooting tips.

Turn off 3G and GPRS

Turning off 3G should be your very first step unless you have a huge (also known as expensive) data plan. When I first got the phone and I asked the sales person how to switch off 3G, he told me it wasn't possible. I dunno if he was just misinformed or was following company protocol. Let's hope it was not the latter.

Go to SETTINGS >> GENERAL >> NETWORK >> ENABLE 3G. Just switch it off. For the more visual people out there, refer to this.

Don't activate your GPRS. Usually you'd have to reply to a sms and save settings the returned sms. Since the iPhone does not support MMS, who needs GPRS.

You definitely want to avoid horror stories like this and this.

Free iTunes account

Unless you want to jailbreak the phone, you would want an iTunes account. This would let you download free apps from the app store. You would need a credit card (debit card not accepted) if you want to buy paid apps.

Basically download iTunes. Click on iTunes store and make sure your country at the bottom of the page is set to Singapore or the US. Then click on a free app and proceed to download it. You'll get a prompt to sign in or sign up for new account. Sign up for it and make sure u click payment option as NONE.

See here if you are lost.

When I first tried it, it gave me this error message “You did not complete the entire form. Please enter your credit card number. The credit card expiration date you entered ha already passed. Please enter a valid expiration date.” I gave up and cursed iTunes. A few days later I tried again and suddenly it worked. I did nothing different, so I guess if it doesn't work you just have to be patient. I wished I could be more helpful but there you go.

iTunes and syncing

A major, major bugbear to me because I faced so much difficulty loading songs into my iPhone. In fact 3 days after use, I was trying to update my firmware to v. 2.2 and thanks to syncing problems, my iPhone turned into iBrick. I had to go back to Singtel to get it reset.

Apparently the root cause of all of this lies in the fact that it is definitely USB-port-related. From what I've read it seems that it has to do with the iPhone drawing power from your USB ports.

In my case, the solution was plugging the cable to the ports at the back of my computer as opposed to the front. The back ports were better powered than the front.

Other solutions included unplugging any USB mouse and plugging it again (for laptops mostly), plugging in USB drives on another port and transferring a file to the computer from the drive while iTunes and the iPhone was trying to sync and basically unplugging all USB connected devices.

Apps autoclose themselves

This problem happens when you sync to 2 or more computers with iTunes.

After my phone became an iBrick and I reset it, I tried downloading songs on iTunes on Sidah's computer instead. Worked perfectly. (This was before I discovered I could just plug the USB at the back instead of the front.) Then I opened an app and it closed within 2-3 seconds. WTH.

The solution? If you are syncing with 2 or more computers you need to authorize-deauthorize all the computers u are syncing on. When in iTunes, click STORE>>DEAUTHORIZE. Then click STORE>>AUTHORIZE and sign in with your iTunes account. Once it is authorized, sync again with your iPhone. When you unplug it, it should be functioning fine.

Hope this helps!