Help me !Strange Iphone problem, anyone else heard of it?

[TSP]

Hello there!

I have a strange problem with my Iphone and I am hoping that someone has heard of it.

1. I can not call or receive calls without a handsfree or headphones attached.
2. I can make calls and receive calls when I have handsfree or headphones.

3. When I try to make a call without handsfree the E standing for edge disappears and the call dies with the message "call failed" and the phone becomes really slow and at times it displays no service and most of the time my carrier appears but with low coverage.
4. Have tried my sim-card in other phones without any problems.

Anyone heard of this or a similar problem? Would like to know if the only solution is to leave it at apple(telia in Sweden where I live) and wait for like 3 weeks or if there is something I can do to remedy the situation.

I have a 16-gb iphone with 2.2.1 firmware, never been jailbroken. I can send text messages without handsfree. Have rebooted, reseted and reinstalled so far.

Help please!

[BATTLE BORN]

try to clean out your headphone jack. I was able to clean mine a bit with a q-tip, but when I took it to the apple store, they had some sort of tool that cleaned it right up (for free). no problems since.

the reasoning behind this is that the jack gets full of crud and thinks that the headphones are plugged in. disabling the regular earpiece.

EDIT: hope that works for you. I had to cut off a bit of the q-tip to fit it in the hole, and I may have used just a bit of windex on there. I learned this trick from a bit of googling when my phone had similar problems. but if you're close to an apple store, it literally took them just a minute or two to fix me up. my warranty has expired too, but since I think it's probably a pretty common bug, they fixed me right up and went on my way.

[TSP]

Thanks, have had a moderate degree of success so far, will get higher quality q-tips today. Found more on http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how_to/4258816.html and basically you diagnosed it spot on Battle Born.