Broken iPhone lock button fixed

I have just experienced one of the most ridiculous and embarrassing epiphanies of all my life as an Apple user.

If you read my previous post then you already know how much suffering the broken lock button of my iPhone has caused. Well, today, by chance, I came across this video.

I was about to disregard it because of the bad quality (I couldn't hear what the guy was saying). But then I realized what he was doing. I tried it on my iPhone and it worked perfectly.

To think of all this time of misfortune my unlockable phone has put me through... What a shame.

How my iPhone almost got 100 people killed

Last summer I went to visit a friend of mine who lives abroad. I had a great time, and on the day of my return I was looking forward to sharing the experiences I had just had with my friends and family. So I went to the airport and got on a plane. When we were about to take off, we were requested to disconnect our mobile devices, as usual. I meekly reached into my pocket to pull out my iPhone and comply, but when I attempted to turn it off, it just wouldn't. The button that locks the iPhone, which also happens to be the only means to turn it off, had quietly passed away.

So, there I was, holding a ticking bomb in a plane whose pilots where about to unwittingly start the take off routine based on wrong readings and corrupt signals. I grew increasingly unsteady. I realized (or at least, at that moment, it seemed what was likely to happen) that if I told the crew about my mishap, they would notify the pilots who, outraged, would eventually have me thrown in jail for introducing such a dangerous device in an airplane. I panicked but, in an act of unprecedented bravery, I pulled a key out of my pocket and without thinking twice I sank it into the button, managing to pull its last breath out of it and turn off the damned device. We would all live.

Despite this awful experience, I still keep my iPhone. It is now unlockable, of course, and that comes not without a cost. My phone has got into the habit of calling people on his own more regularly (it already did that before the lock button broke down, just not as frequently). Sometimes, that can be disastrous. A couple of weeks ago, I was celebrating something (can't recall what exactly) with a friend. Somehow, it was suddenly five in the morning and we were shaking our booties (or sort of) in a local dump. I did something with my phone and put it back into my pocket. Then it rang, and when I pulled it out of my pocket  I was surprised to see it was my mother. Weird. I realized that answering the call to deliver a mixture of overly loud flamenco music and an attempt to talk without slurring would have been pointless, so I decided to hang up and text her instead, just to know if anything was wrong. While I was trying to type the words 'What's wrong?' (it took a while) she herself texted me: 'What's wrong?'. It all became clear then. My phone had pulled one of his pranks on me. I texted her back saying how my beloved iPhone had called her out of his own will. She understood, for she also has an iPhone and knows how normal this can be.

The next day, she told me that she had got hysterical when I called her at five in the morning, and that it took me ten minutes to text her back. How wasted must I have been....

Maybe I should rather say that my iPhone almost got 101 people killed. My mother could have died of a heart attack during those ten minutes.

One reason to hate the iPhone

I got a call today. A friend of mine is organizing a gig featuring a band I play in, and he needed the phone numbers of other two members of the band. He couldn't write them down at the moment, so he asked me to send them over in a text message. 'Sure. no problem.' I said. At least it wouldn't have been a problem if I had any phone but an iPhone.

So, I opened the text message app, chose the addressee, and proceeded to unleash the procedure through which the user includes the phone number of a contact in a message. However, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find this feature. Bewildered, I decided to ask the Internet for an answer. I was astonished to find the truth. You just can't check your contact list from the text message app to add a phone number.

Before I owned this mockery of a device, I had the phone in the picture. As you can see, it would now be considered a prehistoric device, but when it came to include phone numbers from my contact list in text messages, it got the job done.

When I was looking for the solution to my problem, I acquired further knowledge on the iPhone lack of features. Some said 'You can copy the phone number and paste it into your message if your firmware is 3.x.' What? The first iPhones couldn't even do that? They didn't feature the copy/paste functionality? Did apps come in punched cards, too?

Hold your horses, Apple fanboy, for I know you can include contacts in messages. But, how does my iPhone do this exactly? First of all, you can't do that from the text message app. You have to exit and enter your contact list. But if you select a contact and choose to 'Share it' the following happens:

• If you are already writing a message, the contact will not be inserted in it. Instead, a new, unwanted and costly MMS containing the contact will be generated.
• Saying that the MMS contains the contact is actually a euphemism. What happens is this: a green bubble with the name of the contact written on it will appear in the text area of the MMS. What would I be sending if I sent that message? A green bubble? I don't want to spam my friends with green bubbles. It certainly doesn't look like they're going to get the numbers they asked for. In fact, I tried to send that to my girlfriend (who is smart enough to own other kind of phone) as a test, and I just got an error message. I suspect that if and only if the person who gets the MMS has an iPhone, the contact will be added to their list. Maybe.
• Just now I realized this problem wasn't complex enough for a list, but two elements seemed too few.

I still can't believe that such a hyped device lacks features as essential as this one. They advertise the new iPhone as 'The most amazing iPhone ever'. If they keep making them so useless, they'll never cease to amaze me, that's for sure.