Troubleshooting: How to Fix a Frozen iPhone

It might be just as powerful and fast as a state-of-the-art computer, but your beloved iPhone is predisposed to some frustrating issues. More often than not, your iPhone becomes unresponsive. It’s a frustrating issue and a restart commonly cuts it, but what about when you’re dealing with a frozen iPhone and the home and sleep keys are experiencing glitches. So what do you do to fix a frozen iPhone besides performing a full Restore in iTunes?

First of all you need to know what kind of operations can freeze your iPhone. Some apps and widgets could require so much of your iPhone that it will stop responding to touchscreen gestures. Sometimes even displaying a sizeable webpage or loading a video can impact with the smartphone’s performance. Other times you’ll have to handle a black screen issue, although you haven’t turned off your device. Experts say that this is something a dead battery could cause.

To unfreeze your iPhone start by performing a simple reset and see if the Home button works. Also try to turn it off and on again. If that doesn’t work you will have to perform a hard reset.

To perform a hard reset on your iPhone, hold the sleep/wake button and the home button at the same time. Do that until the iPhone’s screen turns black. Sometimes you need to do it until after the red power off slider shows up. Wait for the white Apple logo to appear, then stop holding the buttons and wait for the iPhone to finish the reboot.

If those don’t work, it’s time to restore your iPhone to a safe firmware. By performing a restore, your iPhone will be cleaned of any software bugs, but that means the smartphone will be taken back to default factory settings. However, while this is a great solution to fix software glitches it also removes all of your apps, documents, pictures, music and so on.

All you have to do to restore the iPhone is to connect the device to the computer and sync data. Select your iPhone in the list of devices prompted in the left column, then click on the Restore option in the Summary.