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The Mysterious “Special” iPhone Status Bar

wtf-20090127.jpg

Here are two iPhone home screens. On the left, my iPhone home screen from a few months ago. Everything normal.

On the right, my iPhone home screen from yesterday. And something weird has happened.

An additional line has been added to the status bar at the top, pushing all the app icons closer together. It displays only the characters “O2″ – the name of my British network provider. Which is already displayed, of course, in the main part of the status bar. What, as they say, the frak?

The extra line appears to have no function, doesn’t interfere with any apps, and remains visible on all app screens as you flick from left to right.

Suspicious, I asked some friends and the Twitterverse if anyone had seen anything similar. No-one had.

But some searching around showed I wasn’t the first to see something like this. Last August, a user at the MacRumors forums posted a screenshot of a similar problem. In his case, the unwanted additional text said “Special”.

All of which leaves me somewhat bemused. What is this line, and why does it only appear for a few people? And under what circumstances?

I wonder: is this a hidden feature waiting to appear in some future software update? Or is it just a bug in one of the apps I’ve installed? Is it just me and the guy on MacRumors? Have you seen this weirdness? Let us know in the comments.

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He is a columnist for PA, and has written for the BBC, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, MacUser, Macworld, and The Morning News. He has a blog you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

Email the author | Read more posts by Giles Turnbull.

15 comments

    No sign of O2 in a strange position on my home screen.

    The same happened to me with Wind Italy provider some two months ago. In my case the bar read “WIND” or something similar, but after some days it vanished as mysteriously as it appeared. I guess we’ll never know…

    G.B.

    By the way… read those e-mails!

    I had the same happen to me last summer when visiting London for a weekend. It disappeared when I returned back to Yorkshire. Strange.

    I tweeted you about it! My friend had it happen sometime this morning, he sent me a screenshot with the exact same thing.

    I had experienced the same with Orange several months ago, here in Slovakia, I think shortly after upgrade to 2.2 and I thought it was just some quirky side efect. I’ve forgot about it, by turn.
    So if you are going to make the list of double–line–status–bar IPhone owners, count me in ;-)

    Well, the fact you have 6 pages on the old screen and two on the new means you probably removed the application that was causing it.

    Strange. I wonder if it has something to do with the green “on a call” bar that appears in that area when you back out of the home screen while on a call.

    Do you have SpringJumps installed?

    That is very different. I’m more interested in the apps that you have (I’ve never heard of things like “Trunk” or “Quad Cam”). Looking at them in the App Store now.

    I’ve had that line say something SMSServices, but in my own language. To this day I haven’t been able to find out what it meant… Google turned up numerous mentions of this behaviour, but no one seems to know what it implies. Resetting the iPhone solved it

    You need to catch up on reading your mail :)

    Sorry, but sometimes you guys are FAR behind!!!
    this used to happen on my first iPhone… this came with 1.1.4 software update!
    and you just need to reset your iPhone!

    it is not iPhone problem! it’s O2 sending you wrong characters for their carrier name!… this happens if they reset their servers or remap them!

    that happened to me too! but it dissappeared after a few days when i restarted my phone!

    Is it maybe something to do with “cell broadcasts”.
    The network originating one-to-many message and information service?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broadcast

    Just a hunch, though a quick look round the internets brings up conflictions on whether the iphone is capable of receiving them, and if it indeed does, what displayed form they take.

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