iPhone microphone glitch

During vacation in Florida, my old new (will explain later) iPhone 4 become muted when making phone calls. Neither the regular microphone at the bottom of the phone nor the mic for the speaker on the top worked. Except for making phone calls, Skype, VOIP phone app, etc. worked fine for both microphones. I made an appointment at the local Apple store and the "Genius" there told me that it has to be replaced. Since the 90 day warranty (I recently paid $170 + tax to have it replaced due to a real hardware issue) just expired 3 days ago, I have to pay another $170 for a new iPhone 4.

At the same time, he did mention that this could be a software issue as the voice memo is working fine. Well the only way he suggested to clear that is to restore the iPhone as a new phone, which didn't help after spending quite a bit of time to resetting the phone and restoring it.

Luckily I brought my new Blackberry Z10 with me, so I did have a phone to use during vacation.  Once I got back home, a more thorough Google search turned up this post from MacRumors.  It referred to this blog post stating that this is a software glitch which disables the microphone for the native phone call App in iOS. The solution is to play the iPod app (or Music app in iOS 7).  Initially, this solution didn't work. However, I do have the impression that this problem happened when I was using the Microsoft Sync via Bluetooth on the rental car.

After connecting to my Bluetooth headset and playing music for a second then disconnecting it, the problem was solved.

What's surprising is that this seems to be a rather common problem based on the feedback/comments on the blog dated back to 2011.  Why on the world didn't Apple solve the problem or, even recognize it by the "Genius"?

New iPhone 4

My T-Mobile/HTC Wing is dying and I eventually bite the bullet got a new iPhone 4 with a 1.5Gb data plan. It turns out one of the best phones I've got. It almost replaced my laptop for many occasions.

While playing with it, I'm also trying to get on the bandwagon of i-age. I'll be reporting some of the tips I learned on the way.

Today's topic is how to get your own ring tones in the iPhone. This is the part I really don't like Apple. It's just too much of a control freak here. Anyway, I found a very useful web site here. Basically, you need to load the ring tones (likely in mp3) in iTunes then convert them into Apple's AAC/.m4a format. Then manually change the extension to .m4r in Explorer. Then load them again in iTunes, which automatically recognized them as ring tones and save them into the ring tone folder. Of course you need to connect to the iPhone to upload it.