This post is to help anyone who might google not having any audio play through their headset speaker on the Pre.
So there I was, listening to some streaming radio with headphones on the commuter train home when I get a call. I realize that you can answer the call fine and talk through your headphones but, through natural habit, I unplugged my headphones and tried to talk on the phone normally. All of a sudden, there was no sound! SHIT! My phone is barely a month old and already the speaker is broken.
There is a bit of confusion around this specific problem because there are really two problems with the same symptoms. These being:
- You hear no audio through music apps without headphones
- You hear no audio when accepting a call (except through the speaker phone)
- The proximity sensor doesn't work, or the screen doesn't turn off when you put the phone to your face during a call
Through my past experiences with my xbox breaking, I've grown more and more restless in dealing with warranties. So I decided to investigate the problem on the single most powerful resource for the Palm Pre, precentral.net. I immediately found that many people were experiencing this problem, and the accepted solution was either doing a soft reset (sym+orange+r) or by plugging in the headphones back in a couple times to get the phone back into normal mode. This, however, did not work for me. Growing frustrated, I tried pulling the battery, several resets, plugging in the headphone over and over with no luck. As a last ditch effort, I used webOSDoctor to erase my phone back to factory. Still nothing.
Fuck!
Well, this is where the useful information may come for you. As I said before, there seems to be two unique problems with the same symptoms. The first being a software issue, the second being hardware. Yes, believe it or not, there is a hardware problem. The good news is you can fix it completely by yourself!
Before doing what I suggest, please know that I accept NO responsibility for any damage you do to your device. I do not work for palm, nor do I represent them in anyway.
Continuing on, the problem has to do with the headphone jack becoming blocked with dirt - dust - or some sort of fragment. This tricks the phone into thinking that the headphones are always plugged in. Not good! To fix this, you need to simply follow these steps:
- Shut down the Pre, remove the battery
- Get a Q-tip and remove some of the cotton so that it will fit in the Pre headphone jack (see where I'm going with this?)
- Dip the Q-tip into rubbing alcohol and shake off any excess
- Clean out the inside of the headset jack thoroughly (if you don't see anything on the Q-tip, don't fret - neither did I)
- Use the other end of the q-tip to dry out the alcohol
Done! That's it! This is what worked for me and I'm hoping it will save you the trouble of dealing with warranties.