Q: Very Strange Smell

Please don't 'wake up dead' before you get there or you'll have me feeling really REALLY guilty!

I recently went through a hardware swap last week for the iPhone 4 and am experiencing the same nail polish/varnish smell emanating from the headphone and power ports. The smell was present immediately after I took off the protective plastic sheets from the front & back the day I got it.

I'm probably going to take the phone back to see if there's an internal problem, such as a battery or capacitor leak of some sort.

I am currently experiencing this same smell. Did you find out what was wrong?

I thought i was the only one that noticed that... Ok for some reason my iphone 3gs also

Smelled like that, and not to exagerate or anything but i get a mild head-ache after i do.

I've tried both the Mac and the iPad 2 and both made me feel really sick from the smell( and vertigo from the iPad). The plastic smells really sickly bitter sweet and I can't stand it.

I just received an iPhone 4s, fresh from Shenzen, China. Immediately upon opening the box I could smell what smelled like a strong acetone or nail-polish remover smell. It seemed especially strong on the underside of the two plastic strips that were covering the entire front and back of the phone. I have personally unboxed 6 iPhones between my self, friends and family and have never smelt this before.

I've attempted to gently clean the surfaces of the phone with a moist microfiber rag to see if the smell would go away, but it is very persistent, exactly as everyone here has described.

I would suspect that this is some sort of a quality-control error, such as a missing step in the production process such as a rinse or something that would remove this smell from the gorilla glass.

I will be calling Apple Care tomorrow to see what they say about it.

Sounds eerily familiar.  Years ago, the firm I worked for had to have Compaq technicians sent out to repair over 500 laptops because somehow, they neglected to was the flux off of the system boards during the manufacturing process. It produced a smell that sounds very much like this and eventually cause them to fail.  I think Compaq definitely lost money on that deal. We were a large consultancy (one of the big 5 that is no more). They wanted us to send the laptops in to have them repaired, but we argued until they actually dispatched technicians to over 100 locations to fix this. The labor costs alone probably consumed twice what they initially profited from selling us the machines.

I noticed my phone had this smell as well coming from the headphone jack.  I have noticed this iPhone's battery is noticably worse than pevious iPhone 4 models I have had.  I looked it up online (found this thread among other sites discussing this issue) and decided to bring my phone to the Apple Store.  I did this mainly because I read a few places that this may be a hazardous smell and/or something seriously wrong with the battery.

I went to the Apple Story and kind of felt like an idiot.  The "genius" that helped me said he could not smell anything (although he did admit to smelling something but disregarded it to being "in his head").  I told him I just want to make sure this won't be hazardous and my battery wont all of a sudden fry.  He took my phone to other employees and also to look up the issue online.  He came back saying he could find nothing online and no one else had smelled anything.  At this point I started to feel like a moron.  He then proceeded to take off the iPhone back cover to check out the battery.  I smelled the actual battery and could definitely smell the nail polish type smell. He smelled it and again said he smelt nothing.  He took off his own phone and told me to smell it, I did and didn't smell anything like mine.  He then said mine smelled exactly like his.  By now I just wanted to get out of there as it was apparent I either have a insanely accute sense of smell or I am crazy.  Either way this guy wasn't going to help me. 

Definitely be cautious about bringing your phones in if you smell something like this.  Unless you don't really care about looking like a moron in front of other employees.  Others I have talked to about it can definitely smell it, but for some reason none of the employees at the Apple Store in Lincoln Park, Chicago couldn't.

I have this same problem.

Plugging my head phones into the port, I heard this subtle noise, sounded like air escaping, and now all I can smell is this nailpolish odor. Smells exactly like the iPhone did when it first came out of the box.

This odor is constant. I am affraid to even use my device so it is now shut down completely. interesting, the battery pack is located directly under the head phone jack area.

If the battery pack did get punctured, is it pone to leaking and causing excessive damage?

Also, does anyone find the Apple Support website to be difficult to figure out where to look for information? I find that it does not have an efficient design and I frequently get lost.