Tech Blog

Category: iPhone

Thanks, Apple. My iPhone is now nearly useless

Got an iPhone? Got the 3.1 update? Then you might have troubles. I do.

My expensive cell phone from the fine folks at "It Just Works" Headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., has become as unreliable as -- well -- as the folks in Cupertino would have us believe Windows PCs are. And I'm not alone.

I found a 30-page thread less than a week old on Apple's own message boards in which they refer to it as iPhone "coma mode" -- so called because the phones go to "sleep," but never wake up. Under normal operation, the iPhone blanks its screen after a short period of non-use. If you have any sense of security (or if, like me, you use the phone's Mail app to sync up to your corporate e-mail servers), the phone takes the extra step of locking itself as a predetermined interval of 1 or 5 or 10 or 15 minutes. Pushing the phone's home button is supposed to re-awaken the screen, allowing you to enter your four digit code to unlock it.

But, for a lot of us, that just hasn't worked since we updated our phones from the 3.01 system to 3.1. Instead, we find a phone that just does nothing. I can't tell if it's on or off and no combination of keys will revive it except for one: holding the home and lock buttons down for 10 seconds and forcing a reboot.

I followed this procedure four times Monday after picking up a lifeless iPhone. Then, on Tuesday, after believing I might have solved the problem by turning off all push notifications for third-party apps, I discovered the next glitch: My phone mysteriously went from a nearly fully charged state to nearly dead while sitting unused over the course of about two hours (reminder: notifications were off, so it should have been using less battery, not more).

A search of forums suggested one problem contributing to Coma Mode might stem from that aforementioned predetermined passcode interval. A number of iPhone owners, like me, kept their phones set so they didn't fully lock until a full hour had passed. But the 3.1 update, for reasons I don't know or understand, changed the maximum interval to 15 minutes. Some have theorized that those of us who previously had our phones set to 60 might have a bug stuck in the matrix with the new 15 minute max.

Others are suggesting bad apps as the root cause.

I'm not sure, but I've noted anecdotally that a) my phone didn't misbehave at all during travel on Monday while it spent a good portion of time in Flight Mode. Of course, I also made one other change as a test: I disabled all notifications by third party apps. My personal theory is that there's a bug in there somewhere; that one of the apps is crashing while trying to update itself automatically in the background while the phone is 'asleep,' causing a crash and an unresponsive device.

Anybody else experiencing this? Or have any ideas? So far, Apple seems mum. Of course they rarely admit when they've screwed up, preferring to quietly issue another update and hoping John Hodgman doesn't notice.