So for the last little while, I’ve been receiving phone calls and happily answering them on my fancy new iPhone 3GS. However, this past week, I noticed that sometimes, when I received a call, I could hear the other person perfectly, however, the person on the other end couldn’t hear me – strange, no?

At first I thought this was just a Rogers (”Canada’s most reliable network”) problem. The situation seemed to always involve me being in some area that you wouldn’t be surprised to have bad reception – so I thought nothing of it (apart from being a little annoyed)… until this last Friday, when I was making a call from home…

I know for a fact that there is a Rogers tower not too far from my house, and I also had “full reception” on my handset – so, why was it that when I made a call from my home that the other party couldn’t hear anything I was saying and hung up??

Good question – well, after some investigation, it turns out that my “fancy” iPhone had a hardware problem – basically, the microphone would only work if I applied pressure on the phone or if I was lucky and it just decided to work that moment.

Of course, when I finally figured out what the problem was, I was very annoyed to say the least – what would happen now? Do I take my phone to Future Shop where I bought it from and wait a month for them to send it to Apple to have it serviced? Damn it I should have bought that extended warranty! ……. but wait, I had a better idea – let me check on the Apple website and see what sort of services are offered at their retail stores??

I went to the Apple.ca website and went to the “Market Mall” store page – I saw there that I could make an appointment with an “Apple Genius” which would be able to give me some technical support – great no?

So I made an appointment for Saturday (the next day – I think I took the last appointment). When I arrived at the Apple store, I wasn’t really sure what to do… so I went to the back where the “Genius Bar” is. I looked up at this huge LCD that they had behind the counter, where I was happily surprised to see my name as “Next in line” to meet with an “Apple Genius”. Wow! Great!

I was then greeted by an Orange-shirted and very energized employee who had my name in their iPhone and checked me in… I was told to have a seat (in front of a bank of new Apple computers of course) and wait ’till my name was called.

Once I was called up, I explained my story to the representative – not knowing what to expect really… He listened to me and they just responded with “we need to swap your iPhone – let me see if we have any in-stock”. WHAT? I thought to myself… this is great, I have a problem, and they fix it – what a concept… !?

So needless to say, I walked out of the Apple store with a spanking new iPhone!

Moral of the story: relax, you bought a product from Apple – check with them first before freaking out!

~R