When we were in Japan a few months last year, I let Makoto (then two years old) play with my iPhone quite a bit. I had my SIM card out of the phone so short of dropping it in the toilet, I didn’t think he could mess it up too bad. He loved playing with Youtube and the calculator.
Yesterday I let him play with it again after putting it in airplane mode to disable the phone and the wifi.
Turns out the iPhone has a password lock function. Who’d a-thunked it? Makoto showed me this discovery after kindly setting the master password with a series of random taps. The next time I turned on the phone it asked me for a password before entering.
I spent the next two hours doing a reinstall and restore from an 11 day old backup. I don’t think I lost anything important, but this seems to be the ONLY way to fix the iPhone if you ‘forgot’ your password.
1) Hold down the top button and turn it off
2) Start iTunes and plug in the phone
3) Hold down the top and home button for about 25 seconds
4) Follow the instructions to reset your phone
5) Restore a backup
Why, oh why did Apple make the password set function without requiring the password to be entered twice?! I really hope they ‘fix’ that in an update. I know I’m not the only one with a toddler with a password-protection-passion; while Googling I found several other poor fathers in a similar situation.
