Featured article by Allen Brown, Independent Technology Author
It’s no secret that people love their phones. We get attached to these pocket-sized devices that hold onto the contact information for every person we’ve ever met, store all our photos and videos, and connect us to others. Our phones even give us directions when we’re lost. We’re not exaggerating when we say it would be hard to go back to living without them.
Given how close we become with our phones, it can be frustrating or confusing when something is wrong with your phone — a malfunction of some kind or a glitch. Mainly because these devices are so small and intricate, it’s hard to take a look at them and know instinctively what isn’t working. The following will explore some of the things you can do to help solve any technical problems with an iPhone.
Turn It Off And Then On Again
We know this advice is used for everything technical. It’s almost annoying when someone offers it. But it keeps being passed around because this solves a lot of technical problems. Sometimes your device just needs a little reset, a moment of true rest (leave it off for ten seconds or so) before it wakes back up and gets back to work.
Before you try any other form of troubleshooting or repair, take the time to power your device off fully and then turn it back on. If anything, it will save you the embarrassment when you are talking to a professional pShone repair person, and they ask whether or not you’ve done this. No one wants to wait in a long line and bring their phone up to the counter only to find that the person working turns it off and on, and suddenly, it works.
Make Sure You’ve Done Your Updates
This is another piece of advice that is a little bit annoying. But keeping up with your phone updates (and the updates required by the specific apps you use) can help keep things running smoothly. Sometimes it’s necessary to have things work at all.
If you’ve been rejecting the request to update for a while and are now having tech problems, the update might be the solution you need. Sometimes certain features require updates to continue to function optimally. This is because the cloud portion of the app or feature (the service or database that the app or feature connects to) has undergone updates making the old form of communicating obsolete. If your phone or app and headquarters can no longer communicate, you can bet that the device or application will not work correctly.
Take the time to update the apps and phone itself; sometimes this takes an hour or so (it works better if you have a solid and speedy internet connection). If your phone is updated and turned off and on again, it’s time for some proper troubleshooting.
Follow A Troubleshooting Checklist
A troubleshooting checklist is a list of things you examine on your phone, in a particular order, that helps you diagnose the problem your phone is having. Depending on the version of the phone you have, the list will look a little different. Experts at netchimp.co.uk/ have developed a point-by-point list of things that need to be checked and in which order for an iPhone. When it comes to dealing with tech problems for any device, it’s always a process of elimination. This is the same thing they do when you take your device into the shop.
You start with the most common problem the device could be having and then work your way down towards the more rare or hyper-specific issues. This can help you save a ton of time because you’re working from the most likely problem down to the least likely, instead of picking potential problems at random and trying to figure out if that’s the culprit of your phone issues.
It is more than likely that the issue you’re having has been dealt with by other iPhone users in the past. There are over 2.2 billion iPhone users worldwide. Use a checklist to diagnose the problem and then follow the necessary steps provided to sort it out. Once you figure out how to do this, you’ll wonder why you spend so much time stressing or scrolling through forums in the past.
With the above steps followed, you’re well on your way to troubleshooting your iPhone—whatever the problem may be. There are steps you can follow to make the process of getting your phone up and running again smooth and easy. Of course, if you don’t feel confident doing the above things, or if you’ve exhausted the above list and still don’t know what the issue is, take your phone in to see a professional.
