I’ve just completed a tricky Sunday afternoon challenge. A Chinese friend asked me to help her to fix her iPhone. After an update it was behaving very strangely and was stuck on a screen saying that there were more steps to do after the update. Clicking the relevant options didn’t do what was expected though. Never one to run away from a challenge I decided to have a go.
The phone is set to Chinese language and talking gibberish, part Chinese and part something approximating English. I don’t speak/read Chinese or half Chinese/English so that’s not a good point to start from! Luckily Google Translate is getting very clever allowing Chinese text to be photographed and translated. I still didn’t know why it was doing why it was doing what it was doing though, so I spent a long time clicking options (that I couldn’t read) in the hope that I’d somehow convince it to be reasonable. By a miracle I eventually clicked on an option once which highlighted it and the phone spoke some gibberish to me, then I double clicked the option. Double clicking isn’t an Apple thing so I wasn’t expecting it to do the option I clicked, but it did.
Hmmm…some more Googling…seems like iPhones have an assistive touch mode which works that way. So how to disable it? You need to be in the Settings menu but the phone isn’t even getting a start screen. Clicking round some more options at random eventually presented a list of WiFi networks. I can see mine! Putting the password in was a challenge, but I figured out the required key presses. Then more options to navigate in Chinese…google translate photo, work out what they’re saying, repeat ad nauseum. Eventually I got a home page! Some more nifty translations to navigate through the settings menu and I’ve found the Assistive Touch options and turned it off.
Bingo…a fully working phone.
Moral of the story…if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. It’s surprising what you can achieve when you don’t expect to achieve anything at all, even in a foreign language that you don’t know!!