3G Home Button - My Experience with Apple

[greygray]

Nice tip! Thanks!

 

[jagadeeshch]

Hurray, Successful !!

THANKS A TON MARPHONE !!! But i already spent $8 on an app which is alternative to Home Button

Background:

I have the same problem of Broken Home button for around 3 months now.
For my 3G phone (jail broken), I was searching the net for couple of months before i installed "QuickDo" app from Cydia (This is for Jail Broken Phones only). This App works as alterntive to Home Button and will cost you $8 for full version once trial version expires (in 2 days). Once you install this App, you will not require Home button any more.

If i could have came across this link, i could've not gone ahead and bought this App for $8 !!

I have no solder experiance and I have experiance of burning the circuit boards with excess heat and hence decided to not go go for soldering solution as described by MarPhone.
I peeled off the plastic from a copper wire and made a tiny ball (similar to the size of spring contact) with a tail, like a tadpole shape and glued it there to have the tiny ball in same place where the spring contact has broken off and pasted the tail portion of the wire to the black surface of the phone.

Hurray, This worked !!!

Thanks again to MarPhone, we could have never have any clue about this problem without this post.
Damn Apple, this is clear case of bad quality design or material, so many people have same contact point broken !!

 

[luckytempo]

Thanks Marphone but I can't see pics!

Thanks Marphone,

I have the same problem but I'm not sure my Iphone is missing the springs.

I believe that a picture of the detail part should give me an indication but there are no pics anymore on your post.
Please will you be so kind to post them again?

Thanks in advance,

Hello everyone. I wanted to create this thread to maybe help others with this problem. My home button on my iPhone 3g simple stopped working, and after many hours of searching online for answers, the only real advice I could find was to take it back... so I did, here's what I found. Hopefully, this can help anyone searching for this topic.

I brought the phone to the apple store and was told I would receive a replacement due to hardware malfunction, except one of the water sensors (the one in the bottom plug in) was red, effectively voiding my entire warranty. I was not happy, I had never gotten my phone wet, and the water sensor is very easy to see, one single rain drop could set it off, even if it causes no damage to the phone.

So I had a half functional phone, and no warranty. I decided to open it up and see if there was anything obvious inside, after all, what did I have to loose? Once I split the phone in two and separated the two halves, I looked around for a long time before noticing a small piece of metal laying inside. It took me a while to figure out where it came from. Below are pictures of the piece I found. The picture you are looking at is near the backside of the home button, the two small contacts are like little springs that, when the two halves of the phone come together, make contact with a circuit board on the other side, for the home button to function.

Obviously without this little spring in place, there is no contact with the other side and the home button will not work. Here it is on my finger to show you how small it is.

So there you have it. Water damage? Not a chance... And I am not rough with my phone, it is in pristine condition. I found many people online with the same issues. This is obviously a weak point in the design, and I am not the first. I was lucky enough to spot the little piece, its so small it could have easily found its way out the bottom port.

I did fix the phone, so anyone searching for info about this issue if you're in the same boat as me, can see the pics below for how I did it.

So if your comfortable using a soldering iron, and have steady hands, just make a small "chocolate chip" of solder on the broken contact, and then use a pair of very small cutters to trim it down to size to match the height of the missing spring contact. It will work perfectly.

By the way, last apple product I ever purchase. Apple disappointed me big time with this situation. I feel their zero tolerance policy on the water sensors is completely ridiculous. They are far too easy to get even the slightest moisture on them. There are a total of 4 water sensors inside the phone, and the remaining 3 were not triggered, and as you can see there was no moisture whatsoever inside the bottom of the phone where that sensor was triggered, it was actually very clean other than some dust.

Thanks for reading!

 

[sanary]

Hi Marphone

It has been a while since you posted this solution and the pictures are gone... :-(

Do you still have them and can you post them again (I have two 3G that have the same problem)?

Cheers

 

[mackila]

pictures, please