In late August I opened iChat, as I typically do, only to see that no one was online. Having quite a few people in my buddy list this makes for a strange occurrence. I rarely see an empty buddy list. A few hours go by and I check it again, still – no one. After a little bit of investigation I determined that my buddy list simply hadn’t loaded correctly. Since this has happened in the past I decided to go offline, quit iChat, and start over.

That didn’t help. I decided to try to View -> Show Offline Buddies. Sure enough, all of my contacts where showing up offline. I asked Eliza if she was online, and she was, so I quickly deleted her from my buddy list, added her back – and she then showed up as being online. I thought that too was odd but I was happy to get it working again. I quickly went through a handful of contacts that I normally use AIM to chat with, deleted them, and added them back in((This process isn’t too difficult since iChat stores buddy information in the Mac OS Address Book.)).

Later I signed off of iChat and went on with my day. The next time I started iChat. Same thing happened again, even with the contacts that I had added back using the delete-add-again method. Weird.

Now it was time to get out the shovel.

A Google search or three later I found other people that had experienced similar problems. Some of them solved their issue by logging in and out of AIM a few times and poof, their buddy list returned. Others used the method I described above and the changes held. Others still completely “reinstalled” iChat by removing all of their accounts, preference files, and other related files and starting from scratch. I tried all of these solutions and still no dice.

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and so I thought there would be a good chance that the upgrade to a new version of iChat would hopefully help my situation. So I deleted everything related to iChat, upgraded to Snow Leopard, and hoped for the best. Again, it didn’t work.

So, I’m down to the point now where I believe that my account at AOL is somehow messed up. I am not sure where to go from here besides trying to contact someone on the AIM team. If you are on the AIM team, and you’re reading this, you can contact me and let me know how to fix this – and I will be grateful.

Today though, the problem finally showed how bad it was.  The bottom row on my number pad in the Phone application is completely untappable[sic]. The zero, star, and pound symbols respectively are impossible to tap.  I had to make a phone call to a client and was not able to until I SMSed myself the phone number so that the iPhone made the number tappable.

Here is a quick video demonstration to show what this looks like.

The odd part, as I pointed out in this video, is that the keyboard in all applications functions just fine.  All letters on the keyboard function as they should with no dead spots.

Attempted solutions

In case you are finding this page because you too have had similar problems, here is a list of the solutions I tried and what the result was.

• Restarting the iPhone by shutting it off and turning it back on.
• A hard restart by holding both the home and sleep buttons in.
• A full restore of the software using iTunes.
• A full restore without restoring a back up. (see update below)

None of these have resulted in a change. I still believe this to be an issue with the software, in some way, since the keyboard obviously functions perfectly.

Update 9:37pm EST: Helllooo Murphy’s Law! As fortune would have it, the moment I published this entry Viddler, and all of Limelight Networks, went down for a few hours. Go figure. It is back up now though.

Update 8:00am EST, June 17, 2008: This morning I decided I would do a full restore as suggested by Corey Wiley. The difference between the full restore I did before and this one, is that I downloaded the firmware update myself, and asked iTunes not to restore my back up. This would mean that every file on the iPhone would be brand-new.

This didn’t work either. In fact, the message that comes up immediately telling you how to edit your home screen, was nearly impossible to get rid of because I couldn’t hit the “DISMISS” button.

How to do a full restore

I thought I’d take a moment to jot down the steps to do a full restore of your iPhone’s software. It is fairly easy but I realize for some people this computer stuff isn’t second-nature.

1. Open iTunes and dock your phone.
2. Download the latest iPhone software. I recommend only downloading from Apple.com. No third party Web sites. To download the latest version, which is version 1.1.4 as of this writing, you may download it here.
3. Hold down OPTION (on the Mac) or SHIFT (on Windows) and click the “Restore” button in iTunes when your iPhone is selected in the source list.
4. Select the .zip file you downloaded. ((The .zip file is actually the .ipsw file you downloaded.))
5. Once the iPhone is finished restoring, do not choose a back up to restore from, ask to set it up as a new phone.

Again, doing this did not solve my issue. However – I still believe this is a software issue because of the way the keyboard performs so well.

I’ll be calling the Apple Store nearest me, which is 1 1/2 hours away, and telling them that I’ll be bringing in my phone to have it replaced next week. Unless of course I’m really brave and I wait until the iPhone 2.0 software update comes out, but I doubt I can hold out that long for a working phone.

Update on June 26, 2008: Today I went to the Apple Store in Whitehall, Pennsylvania and, after waiting for an Apple Genius for only a few minutes, they quickly replaced my iPhone.  They swapped the SIM card so my new phone was usable right away, but it didn’t have any of my contacts, photos, music, etc. on it.  My recommendation is to make sure you do a full backup of your iPhone before taking it back.

A happy ending!

Last edited: 7:12pm EST on June 26, 2008.