Q: Mysterious random total shut downs following 3.1 update

Hello this is my first post on this forum. I am also having trouble with my girlfriends iphone. Mine is okay at 3.0, but her's is going crazy, and will not work.

Ca someone one please help us? Genius is working fine and recommends all sorts of great apps and then the phone shuts off for a few hours and we learned how to factory reset?

Is there way to unbreak iphone and go back to when everything worked because she is mad at me for updating her's first and not mine first?

Also, i have read in other places about people putting iphone in freeezer and this helping their problems, has anyone had any luck with the freeezer fix for this problem? Please get back to me before bedtime so i know if it is wise to keep iphone in freeezer overnight. Anything is better than broken iphone anyway so will to try just about anythihng!!!

Thanks everybody! though very angry!!

After a couple quiet days, the non-responsive freezes are getting more frequent again. A couple new data points:

- Whereas in the first few days, I could do a hard reset and things would just come back to life, now I'm generally fully out of battery after the reset, necessitating immediate charge
- Others have noted that plugging the iPhone in while it's unresponsive brings it back to life. I have had mixed success with this, but after one of the crashes today I was able to plug it in and get a red "charging from fully depleted battery" icon, and soon thereafter, I was able to wake the phone normally. First time that's happened, and not particularly useful, but curious that it sometimes has worked and sometimes has not.
- Today was the first crash that happened while I was actually doing something on the device (listening to music); all other freezes have been when trying to wake the device after a period of inactivity.

I've filed a bug report, but only have one device log.txt file, since this has usually happened when I'm not near a computer. It's not clear to me how to use the phone when traveling now-- when I get to my destination, I could need to call to make arrangements only to find out that it has crashed and I'm out of battery? I guess I gotta keep a charger plug handy and hope I can find outlets everywhere I might conceivably need a phone. (Not so likely if you just go out for dinner or a movie or something! blah)

Interesting that the pull-down menu for OS in this forum doesn't list iPhone OS 3.1 yet...

I guess someone should go to one of the News networks like Fox or CNN and get a report done. Since Apple seems to not care with all of our complaints.

Headers22 wrote:
Ggarthe, sorry but the sarcasm dripping from my fingers didn't come through on the post. Of course, everything i was told was only partially true. I found the file deleted it, did a restore as new and downloaded a new copy of the os. I didn't copy anything from the previous version of the phone except that I backed up my contacts to idrivelite (app available in the store). I restored those then had to set up everything else manually - all the e-mail, all the social networking apps, all the settings etc. . . So far no new comas but we shall see.

Excellent! So it seems to have helped?

Brian, I've suggested these exact steps twice in this thread. Few seem to be listening. Most here seem more intent on bringing down Apple by switching to another brand instead of working to correct their problem. But I hope it works for you! I know it worked wonders for me in the 2.2.1 to 3.0 transition. Others have also had success with it. Good luck.

G

Brian Bass wrote:
I, too, am having this problem with my iPhone 3G. Interestingly, my iPhone 2G hasn't been affected. The terrible thing is that I purchased my iPhone 3G on 9/12/08 and so it is currently out of warranty. Unfortunate. Since so many others are having the problem (this is the longest thread I think I've ever seen in the Apple Discussions), I'm fairly certain this is a software or firmware problem and not hardware. So I've decided to restore from a fresh version of the 3.1 software, set it up as a "new" phone, and see what happens. Here are the steps I took:

1. Delete the old 3.1 software. Do this by going to the following location in your home folder:

Library -> iTunes -> iPhone Software Updates

Once there, delete the file called "iPhone1,23.1_7C144Restore.ipsw."

2. Launch iTunes, plug in phone, and tell it to restore the phone. At this point it will download a fresh version of the 3.1 software and install it for you.

3. When it comes time to set up as new phone or restore from backup, tell iTunes to set it up as a new phone. It's not that painful and syncing contacts, calendars, etc. means that there is only a minimum of configuration that needs to be done.

So that's where I am at the moment. Hopefully, that will take care of things. I'll post back in a couple of days if I haven't seen the problem return. If it does return, I'll probably post back here sooner than that.

Cheers.

I agree... I may try doing the download and reinstall - if it actually crashes again... which it hasn't since Monday... because *I turned off notifications*. I've seen another person or two suggest this *in this thread*, but noone seems to be listening. I know I've posted this possible fix already...

Try reading the posts, crabby people... yes, there are a billion in this thread by now... I had plenty of time waiting for my XP laptop at work to boot this morning (20 mins - no joke) to catch up on the thread messages.

Ever since the 3.1 OS iPhone update, my phone frequently goes to "sleep" and I can't turn it back on without holding down Home + Power buttons. Also, in just a few hours my battery will go from full to completely dead. If I put it on the charger, it will be back to full again in about 10 minutes (indicating it wasn't really dead after all). This all happened immediately after this upgrade and I had no problems ever prior to that. If the phone doesn't do this strange spontaneous shutdown, the battery will last its normal full day. It's when it shuts down that the battery seems to go crazy. This isn't a hardware issue... it's a firmware issue.

I've called tech support twice and dutifully did as I was told. I restored and reloaded the firmware and content files. Then they sent me to the Genius bar at the store only to be sent away telling me they couldn't help me!

I have been your biggest spokesperson and that's the thanks I get. I have purchased 7 iPods, the iPhone despite being on the AT&T network, one Mac, and one PowerMac, and I'm a MobileMe subscriber and you turned me away when it was your faulty firmware that caused the problem!

You need to fix this issue and fast or you will have lost a very loyal customer.

This is a huge problem apple... it includes me too

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/09/16/iphone-31-bugs-random-freeze-shut/#comme nts

Apologies for missing your posts. It seems that this thread is becoming less and less helpful as more pages are added. Almost all of the posts seem to be simple "roll call" posts (ie, I'm affected) or "alert the media" (ie, somebody should tell CNN) posts. I'm surprised I haven't seen any "we should sue Apple" posts, although I'm sure they are probably buried in there somewhere.

At this point I think it might be best to start a new thread with possible solutions. It would help make sure that helpful suggestions are not drowned out by all of the other noise.

Solution is to use the phone:
1) Inside a fridge
2) On a really cold day - outdoors...

This stops all freezes!! Pun intended

Today after it locked up, I held it in front of an Air Conditioner unit. It came back to life within 2 minutes which is a lot quicker than the usual 10 mins...

I did another restore as NEW this morning and it's been running MUCH better. I had one semi-freeze (SMS crashed) and then the phone worked fine after a reset. Other than that, no problems. Here's what I have and have been using on the phone:

Wifi
Bluetooth
Exchange (push)
MobileMe (push)
Facebook
MLB At Bat
Beejive
4GB of music

I've used all of the above with no problems. I even turned on notifications for beejive. Maybe I'm lucky, who knows, but so far this seems to have done the trick *knock on wood*

Well we have to iPhone 3G's in my house hold, one belongs to my wife and the other is mine. My wife upgraded hers and I decided to wait. Ever since her upgrade to 3.1 nothing but trouble. Her iPhone seems to have the usual symptoms that every other dedicated Apple consumer is having. One issue that I did not see was automatic calling, yes, my wife's phone today auto dialed a contact while she was having a conversation. I contacted the iPhone support line having a feeling they were not going to be able to provide some kind of solution, other than I have already exercised exhaustively. The point to my phone call; well if enough people complain something might be solved. But I couldn't believe the phone tech when he said that the number of complaints or complications for 3.1 are minimal or almost non existent. I come here and I run to almost 50 pages regarding the headache of 3.1. I hope Apple recognizes our woes fairly quickly and gets our issued resolved. Until then we have to solve our own problems; I have downgraded to the 3.0 firmware and everything is stable. Good luck everyone.

I too have just experienced this problem.

I have been having up to 5 phone freeze/shutdowns a day since i upgraded the firmware a week ago to 3.1. I'm tempted to think it's a freeze whilst the screen is off (as opposed to a shutdown) as the hard reset does reboot it where just the power button doesn't, and it drains the battery very quickly and the device gets hot. after a full charge at 11pm last night the phone was dead by 7.30am this morning because it had had a freeze over night (and my alarm didn't go off!).

i called apple care and they claimed not to have heard of the issue and told me i should probably wipe/restore the phone as suggested here.

i called the apple store and they claimed never to have heard of the issue and told me i probably had a battery fault and i should replace the phone (at a cost of course).

over it. i'll try the restore tonight, but it's going to be such a pain!