The strangest thing happened to me last night. I was out with a few friends having a couple ‘thank god it’s the end of the week’ beers, when I decided to ‘show off’ a few of the newer iPhone games I had installed. Being in Canada, a few of my buddy’s actually hadn’t seen an iPhone in person, so it was making its rounds around the table for sure.
I decided to open up ‘Raging Thunder‘, a really good racing game that allows you to steer your race car by tilting the device to your left or right. Overall it’s a pretty darn good game and I thought my buddies would enjoy. So, I opened up the app, but just as soon as I opened it I decided to close ‘er down as I could hear someone else talking to me. That’s when all heck broke loose.
The iPhone crashed, or something along those lines. The screen was still on, plain black, but with a slight glow to it. After about 3 or 4 minutes I could see the round ‘I’m working’ graphic on the screen, but even that wasn’t moving smoothly. Another 5 or so minutes later the iPhone had restarted and everything was back to normal, or so I thought.
A phone call came in. Cool.. Picked up the phone and started talking… the other end could hear me, but I couldn’t hear them! I knew someone was on the other end but I could hear absolutely nothing. Lets restart the phone I thought… this is strange.
Restarted the phone and this time our table set out to test what was going on. Sure enough, any incoming audio would not play out on the devices handset speaker, but all outgoing audio would transmit fine. All volume settings were fine, everything was as it should have been. A few more restarts and a few more tries, and still no dice.
I left the phone as it was for the evening, but upon returning home I set out to fix the problem. ‘Hope this will be easy’ I thought… and it was, thankfully. Docked the iPhone, opened iTunes and restored the unit. I did a fresh install of 1.1.4 and after that was done, restored settings from a recent backup of the phone. From there, I downloaded and ran the latest version of ZiPhone, and I was back in business. Tested out the phone again, and bingo bongo it was working like butter again. Ordeal over.
So what can we learn from this? Be cautious about third party apps…and backup your iPhone often! I’m not going to discourage you from using or installing anything (go for it!) But I think we all have to realize that 3rd party apps can and sometimes do funny things to the iPhone. In my case incoming audio stopped working for some unknown reason, triggered by a 3rd party app crash. Install 3rd party apps at your own risk, and accept the consequences. That’s the best way to look at it.
On the way home last night I had set myself up for the worst, ‘Well, looks like I might have a brick on my hands…’ Thankfully that wasn’t the case.
Anyone else out there experienced similar problems!? Would love to hear your strange and kooky iPhone horror stories!
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TAGS: iPhone, Ziphone
