As one of the most popular devices in history, the iPhone’s problems are magnified when compared to others. Fortunately, most of the problems the iPhone has are as easy to fix as the device itself is to use. These are five of the most common iPhone problems and what you should do if they happen to you.
Stuck Power Button
Perhaps one of the most common and easy-to-fix iPhone problems, the stuck Power button is incredibly frustrating. If you find yourself in this position, a quick fix is to spray compressed air into where the button rests with the device. This will be enough to fix the issue in some cases, although severe cases may require disassembly of the device.
Phone Is Unresponsive
You were using your iPhone fine one minute, then it started to slow down and eventually you got a black screen. Perhaps you weren’t using the phone at all, but went to make a call and couldn’t get it to do anything. Whatever the case, your iPhone is now effectively worthless. Before you contact Apple or your cell phone carrier, try holding down the Home and Power buttons at the same time. Do so for about fifteen seconds, and you should see the Apple logo appear and the iPhone will boot like normal. This simulates a battery pull, and it’s effective for fixing software glitches such as these.
“No SIM Card” Error
This is an issue that only began to occur with the iPhone 5 and its support for high-speed LTE networks, although it did happen from time to time on GSM variants of older iPhones. From time to time, your iPhone might display “No SIM” or a similar error in the upper-left hand corner where signal strength is usually displayed. It’s unclear exactly what causes this, as it could be a glitch in iOS or simply a hardware defect in the SIM card reader. Either way, the easiest resolution is to power down the phone, eject and replace the SIM card, then power the phone back on. The problem should be fixed now. If it persists, your next step would be to have your carrier issue a new SIM card.
Insufficient Storage Space
This is typically an issue with larger applications and either initial downloads or subsequent updates to them. You’ll try to download the app or update and receive an error about having insufficient storage space. You check the size of the app, then look at your Settings app and realize you have more than enough space to download it – so what gives? Apple actually requires the device to have a certain amount more storage available than a download will actually require. The easiest fix is to delete some albums from your phone in order to get the download going, then just re-sync the deleted music after the download.
Receiving Other Peoples’ iMessages
You and your family members all have iPhones. Suddenly, you’ve began to receive iMessages that were meant for others. It just so happens that Apple changed the iMessage platform with the introduction of iOS 6. Where the old version of iMessage was only associated with your Apple ID, the newest version also attaches your phone number to the service. If you’ve been sharing an Apple ID with others in your family, you’ll notice that you now receive all of each other’s iMessages. Sadly, there is no quick fix for this: You’ll just have to create and use separate Apple IDs from now on.
As you can see, many of the iPhone’s most frequently encountered problems have readily available solutions. Problems with the device are easy to diagnose, adding to its user friendliness. You don’t have to be a technician to repair an iPhone, all you need is a decent resource.