iPhone Wifi/Bluetooth Problems
Posted Aug. 15, 2008 by Gabriel Hurley
I had some pretty major problems with my barely-month-old 3G iPhone this week. When I upgraded it to the 2.0.1 firmware (through iTunes, 100% legit, no jailbreaking, no unlocking, no hacks, no nothing) the first time it outright failed the update and went into Recovery Mode. So I restored it, and this time it completed the process. After restoring all my data from a backup, I noticed some very unpleasant problems including:
- Couldn't connect to wifi or bluetooth.
- In Settings, Wifi was greyed out and said "No Wi-fi".
- In Settings>General, Bluetooth said "Unavailable".
- I could not receive text messages unless my phone was on and in an active state (i.e. I pressed the top button or home button and slid my finger to unlock it).
- The clock would jump around sporadically every time I turned the phone back on. It would start at whatever time the phone had last been on, and then slowly catch up, jumping minutes or hours at a time.
- The battery would drain in a matter of 6-8 hours, even if I hadn't made a single call, or even turned it on.
Obviously there were some serious issues here. The phone had been working perfectly before this.
I spent nearly two days trying every kind of restore, upgrade, downgrade, and hack I could find to get the thing to work again, all to no available. I flashed the firmware with all newer and older builds, and even tried a custom ipsw from the latest Pwnage Tool. Nothing helped. Finally I just restored the thing to it's clean factory state, and gave up.
I took it to the Apple Store, handed it to the genius and told him what was wrong. He spent about 2 minutes poking at the settings to confirm what I'd told him, ran one quick hardware diagnostic, and then got out a replacement. No explanation of what was wrong, just that it seemed to be a bad unit and that he was sorry I'd had a bad experience. The whole thing was painless, and was done in less than ten minutes.
I now have a brand new shiny iPhone that works. Life is good again.
You may already know but I've heard that the battery drains slower if you disenable the 3G function. That said iPhones do tend to have update problems on the regular. Though they are still quite awesome.