iPhone freezes or Freezing is an unfortunate thing that all of us living in the modern world have suffered through. No matter how blindingly fast technology upgrades to crazy awesome levels, devices running on computers still manage to freeze up, causing annoyance and outright anger in the wireless population.
The iPhone, in all of its electronic glory, is no exception to the freezing phenomenon. There are different ways of handling a frozen iPhone that don’t involve acts of mass violence as I will explain in this very article.
Going Home
The most common freeze that happens is a software freeze when using an app or a widget. Let’s say you’re on your way to breaking the record of 10,000m in Jetpack Joyride. You’ve lucked out twice on the slot machine getting revived after a couple of rookie mistakes, and all of a sudden, everything will just stop.
Hammer time is not the way to go, though bringing down your righteous fury with a mallet on the device that kept you from ascending into Videogame Valhalla is plenty tempting.
Fiddling with the touchscreen or just pressing the home button won’t work here. You need to actually hold down the home button for six seconds. Mind blowing, right? This will send you back to the home screen. If it doesn’t, read on.
Restarting
This involves some level of ambidexterity, so you might want to get a friend to help you if you happen to have just one hand (so sorry). For those of you fortunate enough to have two working appendages, simply press the “wake” and home buttons simultaneously and hold them down till the screen goes black. The wake button, for you addicts who’ve never had to put your iPhones to sleep, is located at the top.
This will hopefully get you back to wasting your time playing flash games or taking a hundred pictures of your oh-so-vain self when you turn it back on.
Restoring
If God/fate/the universe itself hates you, the iPhone might actually freeze in the Apple screen when it turns on. This means trouble.
Before you try to jump off a building, take a breath and turn it off. Just repeat the method shown above if you’ve got short-term memory loss (or you’re skipping ahead to this part, you impatient little kid you).
Turn on your computer (you do have one of those, right?), and start up iTunes. Again, hold down the wake and home buttons while plugging the iPhone into the computer. If you did it right, the iTunes, arrow, and cable icons should be on your iPhone’s screen. Pat yourself on the back.
Take that self pat back, if the iTunes window doesn’t show a pop-up that says “iTunes has detected an iPhone in recovery mode. You must restore this iPhone before it can be used with iTunes.” If it does show, take a sigh of relief.
Before you start getting giddy like a schoolgirl and click the OK button, let me remind you that this procedure will not restore any music you have in your phone. It always helps to keep back-up data to avoid having to accept the pain of letting go of your entire library of showtunes and 90’s boy band music.
Once you’ve come to terms with the loss of your happy childhood memories, click OK and then “Restore” in the main iTunes window. This painful process will only take several minutes, so this is a good a time as any to go take a leak or to call your mom.
Zip up or hang up once it’s done, and your iPhone should be back to normal from iPhone freezes. Your bookmarks and contact data should still be there. Settings not from the “default factory settings” will be removed, but everything will remain the same.
If you were smart enough to keep all your stuff backed up, you can just proceed to load it into your phone through iTunes. If you weren’t, well, you can just download it all again from the Internet anyway.
IF NOTHING WORKS when your iPhone Freezes
Bring that to an iPhone repair store. Or Apple. Depends on how much you want to spend. You just have to sack up and pay up. I hope I’ve been helpful and above tips will help you to move on when your iPhone freezes.
