So sad. It appears that the home button on my 1st gen iPhone has gone bad. I took it to an Apple Store, but the Genius said they couldn’t crack it open and fix it; I’d have to buy a new phone. I guess I could ship it to some 3rd party repair shop, but that’s kinda sketchy, and who knows, expensive.
I Googled the home button issue, and a lot of the stories seem to mention corrosion near the home button and its contact with ribbon cable… er, something like that. I think this rust and corrosion thing could be the deal and it seems to be when my problems started. I have never dropped my phone and have been extremely careful with it, but I did get careless with the temperature and humidity.
I left my iPhone in my car during some chilling temperatures, but nothing too cold for the acceptable storage temp mentioned in the iPhone owner’s manual. I’d say it got around 25ºF and was in the cold for 2 hours-ish. Maybe I operated it too early, before proper warming time.
Anyways, I was inside a skatepark, skating a skatingboard, for skating’s sake. I was sweaty – okay I get sweaty while eating steak and steak soup with a side of steak, but, yeah. So I returned to my cold car with sweat steaming off my hot, naked, writhing hair. I grabbed my iPhone and shoved it into my damp, jeans pocket and drove off.
So I think the sweaty, humid air condensed on the iPhone, through any cracks, and on the electronics inside, thus rusting the aforementionedheretofore parts around the Home button. :(
Sad Panda
I only hope that Apple announces and releases a new, suped up iPhone in the next month or so, because this problem seems to get worse, requiring me to really mash down on the Home button and making the handy feature of double-clicking the asleep iPhone to immediately access the iPod controls (love that feature). Fingers crossed.
Although… I will admit that blowing air into the seam of the Home button does seem to alter the amount of pressure I need to use to get it to work, briefly. So maybe the dust build-up theory is possible, but I don’t recall a gradual degradation of the Home button death in my case.
