Not an emergency phone that needs replacement, but rather an acknowledgement that I’ve waited to replace my old phone for so long that the battery life seems to have fallen off a cliff. The last two weeks or so, it’s been degraded enough that an 8 hour workday, without any usage, was enough to put the charge level into the red. But this morning, I’m at best 6 hours into a charge, and it’s already below 25%.
And now it just started to reboot itself for no obvious reason.
This morning, I’m trying to surf from my phone, and I get this content filtered err message saying my phone has been enabled for “Web Guard” which has determined I’m trying to go to a naughty page, which can’t be allowed.
So I call tech support. First there’s the ‘helpful’ phone system that says it understands speech and touch tones, but doesn’t understand either, and if it doesn’t like your response three times in a row, disconnects you entirely, instead of passing you on to a human. I finally figure out something it recognizes and get a human, who is full of fail on my problem, and of courses asks me to do the traditional reboot of the device. At which point my phone stops powering on correctly. It gets 75% through booting and then hangs on a blank screen.
Seriously? I call for messed up internet, and now I don’t have a working phone at all? And of course he helpfully suggests that I can buy a new phone since I’m out of warranty on this one.
Now I’m regretting not pick up one of birdie’s spare iphones.
UPDATE: I spent an hour or so seeing if there was any way to get at my storage on the phone, so I could backup anything non-cloud, but no joy. After doing a factory reset, the phone seems to be working again. At least with Android I’m not missing any contacts, just all the text messages since the last time my G1 died.
UPDATE2: It looks like this new life might be temporary. The phone is running hot and crashed once so far, while trying to re-download all my basic apps. And I notice it’s stuck in edge mode instead of 3G. Hrm.
I installed the twitter app on the iPad and the Galaxy Tab. When I went to install it on my phone, it doesn’t show up in the list of installable apps for my phone. It was such a cool shiny once, now it’s all dull and old. Time keeps on ticking, etc.
Sigh, boy am I wishing for the iPhone’s plug-and-play backup and restore system.
Before lunch today, my G1 had been running slower and slower as of late, taking literal minutes between closing an app and fully displaying the home screen, so I shut down the phone.
When I started the phone back up, it didn’t seem to be acting much better, if not worse. Then I noticed that the home key had stopped working completely, and the menu displayed on a long press of the hang-up key only showed “power off”, completely missing the options for silent and airplane modes. What’s more, mounting the SD card caused the phone to play a ringtone until the phone was shutdown again. Googling around suggests the only fix is to reset the phone to factory condition and reload all your apps/contacts/etc.
So, I did the reset, said ‘yes’ to all the ‘destroy your data’ prompts, and sure enough, once it rebooted, the phone was working better, albeit without anything on it. And of course Namco isn’t giving away pac-man anymore, asking $4.99 for what used to be free.
Having a headache from the near constant sneezing fits I’ve been having today isn’t helping my mood any.
UPDATE: ARGH squared. Trying to re-install apps, started with Google Voice, the phone just reset itself.
Please implement a whitelist system for my phone. Any call I get that doesn’t correspond to an existing contact should go straight to voice mail.
Thanx
I dunno who to blame, the Galaxy Tab, or the Android OS, but the auto-brightness feature sucks ass, so it was one of the first things I turned off. Well it turns out that every time you open the camera, it turns auto-brightness back on. Fracking jerks.
Well under the 1 year mark, and my G1 battery has gone kapput. You can try to call me, and I might be near an outlet and plugged in, but don’t count on it.
woo hoo technology =p
UPDATE: Bought a new, OEM, battery at the tmobile store (way overpriced, but I wanted my phone to be working again now, silly me), and the phone refuses to charge it too, so that was a big waste of time.
UPDATE2: Just noticed, the user manual doesn’t mention the orange LED, only the green and red. Strange.
UPDATE3: t-mobile customer service rocks. they are 2-daying me a replacement phone, no major grief, and refunded the new battery that didn’t help. HTC, on the other hand, makes a crap phone it seems.
UPDATE4: so, replacement phone came, and it won’t charge the old battery now…sigh.