How to Reset an iPhone
I’ve been using my iPhone for the past three days and have had to reset it three times so far. Of course I didn’t bother to learn how to reset my iPhone until it was too late. Save yourself some trouble and memorize the iPhone reset keystrokes below.
I brought my wife shopping yesterday and thought I’d be able to entertain myself with my new iPhone. As I opened a page in Safari, my iPhone just quit working. I punched and prodded at the power button, home button and even the volume buttons for several minutes in an attempt to reset it. No luck- I was stuck watching her try on dozens of pairs of shoes for the next hour without being able to escape into my email and videos.
Our next stop was the Apple Store in San Francisco, where a Genius promptly apologized for my troubles and told me there are three ways to reset an iPhone.
1) If an application (such as Safari) is frozen, just press and hold the iPhone’s home button for about 5 seconds, or until the home screen shows up. (This didn’t work for my iPhone so we had to perform a soft reset).
2) To perform a soft reset, press and hold the iPhone’s Sleep/Wake button and the Home button for several seconds, or until you see the apple logo on the screen. (This action did reset my iPhone and I was very happy at this point). The guys that helped me said that continually performing soft resets can cause problems however.
3) Hard resets are not recommended, but are required when a soft reset won’t do the trick. The Apple Geniuses wouldn’t tell me the key combo to perform a hard reset because it restores the iPhone to a state that’s unusable. Users risk losing data and you must synch your iPhone with iTunes to make it function after a hard reset.
update: Here’s a video I recorded while my iPhone was stuck and before I learned how to reset it. I suggest all iPhone users memorize the reset process so they can avoid frustrating experiences like this.
It ends up my iPhone was a bad apple (pun intended) and had to be replaced. Fortunately, the service at the SF Apple Store is excellent and my new iPhone has been trouble free. Oh yeah just received an email from a friend and wanted to clarify that in the video I said ‘Apple- this sucks’ not ‘Apple sucks.’
Christopher Mills
July 5th at 3:31pm
After multiple soft resets failed to “fix” the device. The next level of reset is to turn off the device and hold the sleep/wake button (only) for approximately 10 seconds. The iPhone will show the Apple logo, then blank screen, the attempt to boot again.