My iPhone keypad started behaving strangely yesterday afternoon. It would randomly stop responding to key hits and I assumed that was because the touch screen had become a tad smeared with many, many finger prints. So I cleaned it off with a wipe cloth. That fixed the random key miss issue, but then the bottom row of the keypad stopped working correctly. It would respond to touch, but only as if I’d pressed a key in the row above.

Maddeningly, applications such as my third party notepad app that have a landscape keyboard are immune to this. But the Facebook app doesn’t do a landscape keyboard. At least the version I have. As if to torment me, the App Store icon notified me while I was fussing with the problem, that there is a new version of the Facebook app out there. But I can’t get it because the app store asks for a password and mine is, in good practice, both alpha and numeric and the keyboard problem prevents me from accessing the numeric keyboard.

I’m reading online that the problem is not fixable via a reset or anything else you can do. It has to go back to the Apple Store. Rather then spend my time here finding and going to an Apple Store here in Orlando I’m just going to save my replies for when I get back to the hotel and my laptop computer.

Because the spacebar row on the keyboard isn’t working, I can’t do anything with most iPhone apps that use the keyboard. This includes mail, Facebook, Notepad and Notebook, Calender, SMS Text Messaging (the send row at the bottom won’t even open up the keyboard), my third party ToDo app, the Contacts app. Oddly, the bottom row works just fine in the Photo Library. I can’t even update the apps I have because I can no longer enter a password.

So until I can get it fixed…my iPhone is just a phone now, mostly. I have a feeling since it’s almost two years old now, the fix will be to buy a new one and I was hoping to skip over generation 2 to generation 3. Unless they can give me a replacement first generation phone, which I doubt.

As I said on Facebook, it’s a good thing I grew up before most of this stuff even existed…cell phones, the Internet, email, personal computers, text messaging…in that I don’t completely loose my wits when it stops working.  I’ve seen people get completely irrational when they loose their email service.