More Help on the Apple Website

If you try everything we suggest earlier in this chapter and still have problems, don’t give up just yet. This section describes a few places you may find helpful. We recommend that you check out some or all of them before you throw in the towel and smash your iPhone into tiny little pieces (or ship it back to Apple for repairs, as described in the next section).

First, Apple offers an excellent set of support resources on its website at www.apple.com/support/iphone . You can browse support issues by category, search for a problem by keyword, or even get personalized help by phone, as shown in Figure 16-3.

While you’re visiting the Apple support pages, another section could be helpful: the discussion communities. You find them at http://discussions.apple.com , and they’re chock-full of questions and answers from other iPhone users. Our experience has been that if you can’t find an answer to a support question elsewhere, you can often find something helpful in these forums. You can browse by community — Using iPhone, iPhone Hardware, iPhone in the Enterprise, or iPhone Accessories, as shown in Figure 16-4 — or search by keyword.

Figure 16-3: The Apple iPhone support pages offer several kinds of helpful information.

Either way, you’ll find thousands of iPhone discussions (for example, 335,457 on using the iPhone when Figure 16-4 was captured) about almost every aspect of using your iPhone. Better still, frequently you can find the answer to your question or a helpful suggestion.

Now for the best part: If you can’t find a solution by browsing or searching, you can post your question in the appropriate Apple community. Check back in a few days (or even in a few hours), and some helpful iPhone user may well have replied with the answer. If you’ve never tried this fabulous tool, you’re missing out on one of the greatest support resources available anywhere.

Last, but certainly not least, before you give up the ghost, you might want to try a carefully worded Google (or Yahoo! or Bing) search. It couldn’t hurt, and you might just find the solution.

Figure 16-4: Four iPhone communities have thousands of discussions about all things iPhone.