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The iPhone’s Achilles Heel

Many probably don’t consider this, but I had to this weekend. Over the holiday weekend, my phone performed as needed until Sunday when I went to call my tennis loving mother about the epic battle between Nadal and Federer at Wimbeldon. My call appeared to go through as I could see the little timer counting my time connected, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. Upon further examination, I didn’t hear any of the little clicks either. It rang, but that was the only audio coming out. I thought for sure my phone was dying.

I rebooted the phone, but there was no change. I restored the phone, but there was no change. I couldn’t imagine being without a phone for any period of time, so I scrambled to see if I could get into the genius bar that afternoon. It was 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, the store closed at 6:00. I was lucky enough to be able and get an appointment and grabbed the kids (who had to skip swimming because of this) and scrambled to the store.

It turns out that dust had gotten into the headphone jack (probably when I went to the gym that morning and used my headphones). This caused a short circuit that fooled the phone into thinking headphones were still plugged in. The great people at the genius bar (they have been very helpful to me on many occasions) took my iPhone  in back and used a special machine to remove the dust putting my phone back in action. Since my phone was fixed I began to walk away, but then I turned around to ask if there was any technique to clean it myself so that next time it happened (I am confident it won’t be the last) I didn’t need to scramble up to the Apple Store to get it cleaned. However, Apple doesn’t recommend doing this on your own. The genius that helped me did recommend looking online for a plug to cover the ports when not in use.

Most cell phones have a rubber or silicone protector to go over their ports, but the iPhone doesn’t come with them. I looked online at over 40 pages of results for various Google inquiries and found no plug of any kind for the headphone jack. There are companies that make them for the dock connector, but not the headphone jack. I found several articles that homebrew solutions using erasers and other paraphernalia, but they seem like they will just cause more problems over time. Has anyone found these plugs anywhere?