How to clean your Headphone Jack

2G, 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4 headphone jacks can get dirty, grimy, corroded and/or filled with lint, which can hamper you getting the full use of your iPhone. Symptoms that may be resolved by cleaning your iPhone headphone jack is...

• the headphone jack won't fit down all the way*
  
• Sound only coming out one side or speaker
  
• Moving the headphone jack makes audio go in/out
• Earpiece doesn't work during Phone Calls (test by hitting the volume keys while the iPhone is unlocked: if the iPhone indicates that you are changing the heaphone volume and not the ringer volume, it thinks something is plugged in when there is not! )
• You can see dust/lint inside the headphone jack.
  

How can you resolved that?

Our recommendation is two-part:

• Take a needle and pic out what dust, dirt and lint you can out of the headphone jack
  
• Take a Q-tip and pull off some of the cotton (about half from a name-brand Q-tip) and twist the remaining cotton around the stick. Make sure it's small enough that you do not have to jam it in the jack, but large enough that when you spin it, it can clean the contacts inside the headphone jack.

DO NOT GET THE Q-TIP WET WITH WATER OR ANY CLEANER AS THIS CAN SHORT OUT DIODES NEAR THE JACK AND PERMANENTLY HAMPER OPERATION, TURN THE LIQUID INDICATOR INSIDE THE HEADPHONE JACK RED AND INVALIDATE THE WARRANTY!!!

* except for 2G iPhones that have a recessed headphone jack, you might need an adapter for non-standard iPhone headphones.

If cleaning your iPhone headphone jack did not help, check out these replacement services:
iPhone 3GS Headphone Flex
iPhone 3G Headphone Flex

A Clean Restore...

Lets say you had problems with your device, and so you restored your iPhone... Once you reinstall the Operating System (use the Shift key when pressing restore to restore older firmware, or Option+Click for MAC), you can either setup the phone as a new phone and sync your contacts, or restore from backup. I recommend that you don't restore from backup if you had problems with your device. Why? If your restore from backup (for the differences in sync/backup see the previous post) you *might* restore your problems too... esp if those were caused by a rogue program or bad settings. Our recommendation is to not restore from backup for that very reason.

You will still have to resync media (such as movies and music) no matter which option you choose.

Advantages
- Much cleaner install, much like a computer after it has a fresh installation.
- While you might have to start from scratch downloading apps, you can select just the ones you want. The more apps you have, the slower it will run! (You can also sync apps to the phone from iTunes... see the applications tab for sync details).
- re-sync for your ringtones, movies, podcasts, more!
- Once you accumulate enough text messages in the database, it can slow down the phone.
Disadvantages
- You loose your text messages (vs restoring from backup)
- You loose any custom settings (such as email settings) (vs restoring from backup)

2G Speaker Fix

You got the original iPhone? Is that speaker just not as loud as it used to be?

Take a needle and pick out the residue out of the tiny holes in the bottom of the phone! honestly you can't cause much damage on the speaker-side of the phone with the needle, and only the middle 10 holes or so will actually effect what you can/cannot hear!