How to reboot/restart a crashed or frozen iPhone
By John Pospisil
As much as I love the iPhone 3G, I do find it quite bizarre that it seems to be so prone to crashing. What’s even more bizarre is that Apple doesn’t provide any information on how to reboot the iPhone in the included “Finger Tips” instructions.
Yes the instructions provided tell you how turn your iPhone on and off (hold the On/Off button), but not how reboot after a crash.
While at a family function a week ago, my iPhone suddenly stopped working. The screen showed the contacts list, but I wasn’t able to go to the Home screen. As I much as I tried every possible button-pressing combination, I just couldn’t work out how to reboot the iPhone. It was only later when I got home and to my PC that I was able to resolve the problem.
And more recently, I arrived at my daughter’s kindergarten to pick her up, only to find one of the carers pulling her hair out trying to get her iPhone to work after it had frozen. She’d already called the support service for her carrier, but was still unable to unfreeze her iPhone after getting advice from support staff.
Luckily I was able to step in and help, since I’d had a very similar problem.
So what’s the trick?
Basically all you need to do is to hold down the button on top of the iPhone (the On/Off button) and the button just under the screen (the Home button), at the same time, until the screen goes blank.
You should then be given the option to “slide to power off”. Once you’ve done this and the iPhone is switched off, you should then be able to turn it on by holding down the On/Off button.
You’ll then see a white Apple logo, which indicates that the iPhone is rebooting.
Hopefully, the need to reboot the iPhone will reduce as Apple updates and refines the operating system – and gets all the bugs out. I’m sure that Apple doesn’t want the iPhone to become the “Windows” of the mobile phone world.
Until we get to that point I suspect many more new iPhone users will tear their hair out trying to work out how to restart their iPhones after they crash.
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on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 2:13 am
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Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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September 12th, 2008
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September 18th, 2008
THANK YOU for this submission.
September 19th, 2008
Thanks!!!!
September 20th, 2008
dude, i cant thank you enough,
ive been trying to fix my phone for hours,
and you helped alot!
September 23rd, 2008
Thanks man. I was looking all over how to do this.
September 28th, 2008
thankyou !! this helped me alot my screen was frozen for ages before
September 30th, 2008
oh thanks alot !!!!!
exactly the same problem happend with my iphone and i’ve been searching for the solution on the internet for about 4 hours and now… my iphone is back…
thanks alot man
October 1st, 2008
OMG ….. thank you so much !!! u just saved my job .. i needed to contact my bosses client and i didn ‘t write down his ## and then my iphone froze gosh i almost pull my hair and be fired
altho thx to you
November 5th, 2008
I’d like to thank you too all the way from New Zealand. I spent hours trying to fix it to the point of throwing it out the window…lol. With my old phone I’d pull the battery out then put it back in to reboot but since the battery on the iphone is built in I was only holding down the top button which wasn’y working. I knew someone out there knew how to fix it it just took me awhile to find you on the web.
Thank you again and all the best