iPhone 3GS Frozen! How To Fix

June 19th, 2009

by Amy Stevens Adams

This evening, shortly after completing my article on the new iPhone 3GS, “Apple iPhone 3GS- First Impressions” and giving it glowing reviews, my phone powered-down and locked up. This is an issue that I have encountered in the past with my iPhone 3G, and usually I could resolve the problem by either plugging in the phone, or holding the Sleep button until it gave me the ‘shut down’ screen.

This time it was different. My 7-hour-old iP had completely shut down and nothing I did could revive it. I tried syncing it and got an error from iTunes saying the device couldn’t be recognized. I tried connecting it to a power source. I tried holding the sleep button for close to a minute with no resolution. Finally I just waited to see if it would wake up on it’s own, but after 30 minutes I decided to call Apple support.

As expected on ‘iPhone Day’, Apple was swamped. After a 42 minute call (more than half of it spent on hold), we had it fixed. The solution was simple once we knew what to do… hold down both the sleep button on the top right and the Home button (the round one in the middle) at the same time for several seconds until the phone turns on.

Sleep & Home buttons highlighted in green

Sleep & Home buttons highlighted in green

I held the two buttons down approximately 20 seconds, so it takes a while- be patient. Once the phone came back up I connected it to iTunes and had to restore it to my backed-up file (“asa | boston iPhone” is the name of mine). If you have more than one iPhone on the same iTunes be sure you choose the correct backup file from the dropdown box.  It took about 5 minutes to download the latest OS again, then sync it to my phone. In the end it took about 15 minutes to get my phone ‘healthy’ again after reviving it with the two-button-trick.

Apple was unable to tell me what had caused it to freeze, but they said to try the two buttons at the same time if it happened again. For some people you may not even have to restore the phone, Tech Support told me that often that alone will bring the phone back up without any further action required.

Hopefully this solution works for you if you encounter the same problem. Despite it’s occasional hiccups, I would never give up my iPhone. :)

-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding

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Filed under Amy's Articles, Apple, How-to, Technical | Comments (2)

2 Responses to “iPhone 3GS Frozen! How To Fix”

  1. Brandon on July 18, 2009 7:06 pm

    Thanks so much….saved me! My 3GS froze today when I tried to upload a long video to YouTube! Was clueless how to totally power down and up. Yikes….and THANKS.

  2. CCB on July 19, 2009 11:01 am

    Hi Brandon,

    Thanks for the comment. I know it’s frustrating to have your iPhone freeze. Glad we could help!

    amy

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