Genius Bartending: Broken GPS, Exiting Apps, and SMTP Passwords

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of iPhone troubleshooting for my family members and have saved them a few trips to the Genius Bar. Let’s hope these fixes save you a trip too.

iphone location services menu Dad thought his GPS was broken because the TomTom app could not locate his current position. However, the GPS could locate him on the Maps app so I knew it wasn’t really broken. To fix this we went into Settings > General > Location Services and we found that the TomTom app had not been allowed to use his current location. When an app asks you if it can use your current location and your current location is essential to the functionality of that app you need to choose the allow option or the app won’t work.

Then dad had so many apps launched with the new multitasking feature in iOS 4 that it wouldn’t allow him to launch any more apps (I haven’t encountered this problem myself so I have no idea how many apps he was running at once). Double click the home button (hard circle button) then all the apps you’re currently running will show up in a bar at the bottom and you can scroll through and find an app to close. To close it press on the icon and then a minus sign will appear which you can press to exit the app.

When you get a new iPhone and transfer over all your settings from your old iPhone, your passwords do not transfer. My sister went almost a year and a half not being able to send email from her iPhone because she thought you couldn’t reenter your SMTP password. You can by going to Settings > Mail, Contacts Calenders > select the appropriate mail account > Account Info > Outgoing Mail Server SMTP > Primary Server and then you can enter the password. You have the dig through quite a few menus so I understand why should couldn’t find it. And of course, two weeks after I showed her how to do this she got yet another new iPhone and we had to do it all over again.

Let me know if you have an iPhone problem I can help you with.