Think twice before handing your smartphone to your little ones. You may end up with a permanently locked phone. A two-year-old boy in Shanghai, China, has locked his mother's iPhone by entering the wrong password repeatedly. It is not just a simple phone lock, he disabled the iPhone for 48 years!
Lu, the mother, left the iPhone with her toddler son, allowing him to watch an educational video. When she returned after a while, Lu found that the iPhone is locked for 25 million minutes (over 48 years).
Apple's iPhone can be set to lock out if someone enters a wrong passcode, and with every wrong passcode, the lockout period would increase. Now, it is not clear how many times the two-year-old typed the wrong one, to bring it to 25 million minutes.
"I couldn't really wait for 48 years and tell my grandchild it was your father's mistake," South China Morning Post quoted Lu as saying.
"In this woman's case, the only way out [without waiting] is to erase all the phone data and do a factory reset," Wei Chunlong, a technician, told South China Morning Post.
However, Lu doesn't want to lose all her pictures, contacts and other files by doing a factory reset.
The incident took place in early January, and the mother is still waiting to figure out how to unlock her iPhone without losing her data.
As a matter of fact, this unfortunate incident could happen to any Apple device. So this is a lesson for everyone that it's better to back up your phone data on iCloud or on your PC before handing over the phone to children.
