iPhone/iPod Touch dead spots

When the iPhone came out I wanted one like everyone else, but it simply costs too much money. It wasn't just the price of the phone itself, it was the contract. In fact, the phone isn't that expensive when you consider that it's also an iPod and a personal organiser too.

However, just don't make enough calls or texts to make the monthly payment worthwhile. For this reason I decided to get an iPod Touch. What made it even more tempting was that a trip to the US meant that I could get it for £40 ($80) less than in the UK.

They say that you can lose 70% of your hearing before you actually notice anything seriously wrong with it. No, I haven't gone deaf, but I think the same must be true of earphones. A couple of months ago I suddenly realised that there was something wrong with the iPod's sound. It was poor, lacked bass and stereo separation.

I plugged in some other earphones and wow, what a difference! The sound was amazing - crystal clear treble and thumping bass. It now seems that the original earphones had been very gradually failing. Each day they must have been very slightly worse and the change was so slight each time that I hadn't noticed until it was really bad. The original earphones were obviously broken and were thrown out.

Now the touch screen on the iPod Touch has dead spots. What happened is that a horizontal strip across the screen about 1cm high near the top just stopped responding to the touch. This means that you can't select anything in this area and it disabled many functions on the iPod. A search at Google revealed that lots of other people have had dead spots too, with both the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Considering the number of devices sold, however, it's probably not a large percentage.

It appears that Apple knows about this problem and after demonstrating it at an Apple store they'll replace it on the spot if they've got your model in stock, or they'll order it if they haven't. Mine came in just 24 hours. Full marks for customer services then, but I wonder how serious a problem it is. How many have Apple replaced?