Well, my stepson's eighteenth birthday came around and he wanted nothing more than an iphone.

Oh and of course a subsidy towards the contract and money and... and...

The first hurdle was getting all his contact information off his Nokia N73 mobile phone memory and onto his beautiful new iphone. As the joystick was missing from his Nokia, this proved to be far more onerous than first imagined and he eventually ended up copying them to the sim card one by one. There must be a bulk export or bulk copy command, but we couldn't find it. Never mind he got the contacts onto the iphone within just a few minutes, unless he spent all day at college doing it - I don't know!

But how clever are the design people at Apple? I mean everyone knows they are good - they came up with the Apple Macintosh and virtually invented desktop publishing. Now they rule the music world with itunes and the ipod - superb products both, but what I love is the simple sensible way the sim just slots into the carrier and into the iphone without dismantling the iphone and losing all your settings in the process. Now that's great design.

Now don't pick me up on it, doubtless someone else has thought about getting the sim card in and out of the phone without dismantling the whole darn thing, but the iphone is the first instance I've seen of this.

Anyway, contacts copied across successfully, if a little clumsily. Next step. Getting his music across from his ipod. He has a rather old PC which I put together a year or two ago running Windows XP and iTunes 8.002 or something like that. Anyway, it turns out that this version can't cope with the iphone, but version 9 can. So another false start and we download iTunes version 9.

Well, sync'ing the iPhone must have been a breeze with the new version because my services as unpaid support engineer were not required and the next thing I heard was my stepson showing me how loud the iPhones internal speakers could play music from his transferred iPod music. (Wow, that is really quite impressive volume for such tiny speakers, again very impressive!)

And then - disaster strikes. He wanted to, wait for it, he wanted to, now this may surprise you, but he wanted to you've guessed it, he wanted to MAKE A PHONE CALL from his wonderful new iPhone. But no, there's a problem. Everything else works just great and I mean great, but when he switches to phone mode, none of the "buttons" work. It's like the whole phone mode is locked, but there isn't a lock button, so it must be faulty. Of course I am into panic mode straight away. I mean it's his main (if not only) birthday present and he's just about to go off out with it and it's not working.

I haven't got time to get onto Apple, he's going out in half an hour and I haven't had my tea yet! I remember back to my earlier success with his iPod and resetting that when it stopped working. If I know Apple there must be a similar way to reset the darn thing. I always remember after using the white clamshell ibook, trying an old Mac SE we had in the loft and being amazed at how similar the operating system was. I mean ten years on and they looked and felt the same.

I figured if ther was a reset, it would probably work like the reset on the iPod. All I had to do was figure out which buttone equated to the two that are pressed simultaneously on the iPod.

I asked him to tell me what the most commonly used buttons were and what button he used to turn it off and on. I then started working through combinations of the buttons, pressing two at a time for about 7 or 8 seconds. As luck would have it, I chose the only button on the iPhone face to start with and after only two or three attempts came on the right one. The iPhone switched off and then after a little pause the white Apple came on the screen.

A few seconds - that seemed an age because I really thought I had wiped the thing clean - and then up came the screen with all his lovely "buttons".

Of course I didn't tell him immediately what I did, I wanted to savour the "hero" moment for as long as possible. Eventually I told him - "oh you just reset it like the iPod." "You remember" I said, you keep two buttons pressed and the whole thing starts up again...." But which buttons?

Well, looking at the face of the iPhone, you need to press simultaneously, the button in the lower centre of the face and the button on the top right edge. (This is the wake/sleep button.) The iPhone will switch off, but keep pressed. Aftert a little wait, it will reset and you get the white apple in the centre of the screen. This stays until the "reboot" has happened.

Hey Presto, one rebooted fully working iPhone.