tapping speaker was the only thing that corrected problem for me, but not always...
this afternoon i went to the apple store. told genius the situation. he knew exactly what i was talking about and was able to reproduce the problem in the store by calling the store's number. timer started counting seconds, no ring tone, no sound of apples voice mail message....no sound. for once...my car has never been so cooperative
i mentioned the thread above (from apple discussion forum), and he was aware of it
they replaced my phone even though im beyond 30 days.
they gave me a "black boxed" phone...but i dont mind even if refurbished because i believe there is a hardware problem and i like the idea that the phone has been on a tech's bench for some reason or other, and thus scrutinized more than if it were directly off the assembly line
if this was a software problem, it would have been fixed by now with a patch im convinced
all i had to say was, 'what if my house was on fire and i couldnt speak to 911'...and he turned around to his locked cabinet and gave me a replacement
there is no way anyone with a brain at apple would risk the above scenario if some new code could fix this problem. losing a customer's faith in the dependability of a product's primary purpose (to make phone calls) is not a wise thing to do to stockholders....if a fire extinguisher didnt work consistently would you buy the product? a home security alarm system? a hand gun? a phone? of course not...my problem was much more serious than a poor battery problem or yellowed screen problem or a siri malfunction.
i really think that apple is hoping that the thousands of people with bad devices will quietly go to the store and get new ones without protest from store employees, utilizing the 12 month hardware warranty to explain even phones with unreproducible or questionable symptoms, and that the problem will disappear eventually without media drama
what could the hardware problem be? ive seen some interesting theories concerning lack of, or fluctuating, battery power to the components involved, to unusual behavior concerning the headphone input jack.
to me this is all very interesting from a legal and business marketing/ethics point of view i think
assuming my new black box phone continues to work as intended, at the very least i have paid for a new phone but own a black box phone which i know is refurbished because it came with a scratched bezel
faulty phone and replacement phone both ran 5.0 and then 5.0.1