Q: Mysterious random total shut downs following 3.1 update

i wonder if this is related to push notifications and mail push/fetch. i am going to leave those turned off and see if i run into the problem today. it happened to me twice last night..

Extremely frustrated. Same thing is happening to me. It happens every few hours as far as I can tell, and it doesn't matter whether wi-fi or bluetooth is on.

Currently doing my second restore... I did one to a previous backup, and it seemed to help for around 5 hours, but then the issues came back. I was going to see if it gave me options to backup to a date before OS 3.1 came out, thinking maybe I missed the "see previous" restore points buttons or something... No such luck, so now I'm wasting one to two hours waiting on the restore to finish.

Sometimes the "coma" mode lasts 5 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes or more. A hard restart can get the iphone running and out of coma mode from 30 minutes to 4 hours, but it really gets irritating having to reset my phone every few hours.

Whenever I wait for its coma to end instead of doing a hard restart I have no bars and no carrier info in the corner AND sometime the mini ipod controls (the ones that usually show up from pressing the home button twice while the phone is locked) show up. Strange. It takes about a minute to reconnect to AT&T and then update texts and voicemails...

One way I found to reliably (meaning like 4 out of 5 attempts) get the phone to wake up, is connect it to my computer. It forces it to wake up almost instantly.

I have a feeling that its trying to do something that is lagging or having issues and therefore goes comatose. Lucky I have no idea how to do anything about that.

I think the mini iPod controls show up because at some point when it was in a coma you probably double pressed the home button, thus issuing the command to bring up the controls. This same thing happened to me earlier, the mini controls showed up after it finally woke up. So while the iPhone is in a coma it still seems to be receiving inputs, it just hangs there for a while doing nothing until it snaps out of its coma.

Okay, everybody...

My phone hasn't exhibited this problem - however, by reading this entire thread, only one or two people seem to be actively trying to figure out what's going on. Here's what I found out:

1. Waiting a few minutes (instead of hard-rebooting the phone) sometimes allows the phone to revive itself.
2. It may be related to WiFi, MobileMe, or some other network process.

Has anyone with this issue tried putting their phone in Airplane Mode, just to see if it is a radio-based problem? (I know, it's a phone, useless as such during the test, but still helpful)
Those of you who've hard-rebooted your phones, have you also tried waiting 5 minutes to see if the phone recovers by itself?
Do any of you have apps in common (besides the defaults, of course)? Perhaps apps that use network or location services (again, not including the default installed apps!)?

This issue isn't affecting everyone, so anything you can do to narrow down the possibilities will help!

Doug

I've used Facebook, and then its died after i locked the phone. It's died after I've hit the home button to check the time and then locked it. It's died multiple times in my pocket while it's locked. It seems to be random.

As far as mobile me, I don't use it. I have two imap accounts and one pop account. I have calendars through google. I have no Exchange or Lotus activations. When it's in its newly termed coma mode, nothing wakes this thing up. I've tried wailing on buttons for a few minutes, but then resort to hard resetting my device, which by the way takes upwards of two minutes to complete.

Battery useage is also horrible. Had full batt. Down to 20% after a 22 minute call. Horrible. I have my mail accounts set for 1 hour fetch. None of the above problems were happening with 3.0.1

For myself, I was using the following procedure to sync my google calendar to my iPhone

- http://www.ianfernando.com/2008/sync-google-calendar-with-iphone-3g/
- https://www.nuevasync.com/ - Official website of the sync provider

Since 7 am this morning (now 1:30 pm) I decided to turn off my calendar in my options, which obviously stop the synchronization. Since then, I did not have any lock/coma/battery drain.
However, it is difficult to see if this is the real problem, as the lock/coma/battery drain seems really random.

At first look, it seems like my Phone was hung on a process with a sync...

FYI, you can just use CalDAV for google sync now. No need to use nuevasync anymore and waste your exchange activation.....

Happened again, phone into some deep sleep mode (screen blank), tried to ring my mobile number to see if it would respond, got the ringing tone but phone did not wake up, did not go straight to voice mail which happens if phone is off. Connected to itunes and it woke up again and started to sync. This must be the worst defect apple has shipped, reminds me of my old windows mobile phones which required a master reset every couple of days!

I'm all about finding out why this is happening. Here's my set up...
Push turned on...Google calendar push (using Google Sync), Yahoo email push
Push notifications for BargainBin app and Sportacluar app
Bluetooh and Wi-Fi on, although the coma mode has happened when on 3G with no Wi-Fi connection and also when connected to Wi-Fi.

Other then that I don’t have anything crazy on my phone. Just a bunch of games and stuff that I wouldn’t think have anything to do with this problem.

Has anyone tried turning off the autolock as a work around? Reduces security, but it might be a work around as it sounds as though having a screen lock is a commonality.

I just shut mine off and will post again after some usage.

Thank you teh1tn1nj4. I was about to change this settings...
I will look at this when I can.

I have the exact same problem. Random shutdowns, need to force reboot to get out of it.
I don't have WiFi, bluetooth, push, 3G or anything on at the moment. Really, anything that can be shut down, I've shut down.
And none of it has been on for the time I've been on 3.1, which is since it went live.

And I'm in Sweden, so it's not AT&T either.

I've tried the patience game, waited for it to come out of it but it never would by itself, only if i pushed the home button after a while. waited about 10 minutes.

I don't have locations services turned on either.

I can add that I don't have that (automatic lock) option on, and I've still had 2 "freeze"-episodes. Once yesterday, and once today.

Message was edited by: mlfnk