Why My Android Leaves a Sour Taste 18/03/2011

As an update to my earlier post Jumping on the Android Boat & Telecom Customer Service I must say, my opinion of the i5503T has changed considerably. mainly due to cons that I described originally.

The fact of the matter, is that what I have now found to be called ‘Phone Coma’ isn’t actually specific to me,  and seems to be happening to people worldwide that own the i5503T.  If the phone was just crashing & rebooting, I wouldn’t care that much, as long as the phone is able to accept calls, and be ready if I want to make calls (assuming I have given it enough juice of course) then I can’t complain.  But the phone coma issue, results in a completely unusable phone until the user: a) notices it, b) removes the back, and replaces the battery).  I even tried ringing the number when it was in this state, the phone still accepts the call from the tower, (the caller will get a ringing tone), but the user/owner gets no notification *ever*.

I wasn’t really that concerned, I’d heard reports that unofficial 2.2 firmware builds resolved the issue, but not wanting to void my warranty I decided to wait, a while (I’d heard a rumour than an update was forthcoming, shortly after I brought my phone). However, two things happened.

First, the Christchurch earthquake struck, that vary morning I was just about to book a trip to Christchurch for the week of the 8th March, only to decide to ‘think it over during lunch’, that plan was of course shelved, but in the aftermath, I got thinking, with a phone going into ‘coma’ continuously, with a hard to remove battery cover to ‘fix’ it, what if I was under the rubble and had to communicate to the outside?

Secondly, just prior, there was several discussions on Geekzone about the Consumer Guarantees Act, and eventually hypothesized that surely a phone that often goes into a coma, is not ‘fit for purpose’.

I decided as a result to give Samsung a call to ask them if it was a known problem, and what to do. Even though the issue occurred when it was new, they suggested a factory reset, and ‘if that doesn’t work, take it back for repair’.  Resetting the phone had both issues occur within a day (with no extra applications installed) so I decided to take it back.  Helpfully Samsung had told me that even though I purchased it at Dick Smith, I could return it directly to Telecom(!).

The phone is now in for repair, but the Telecom shop guys were as good as always.

I did say, ‘leaves a sour taste’ well, here it is.  Upon resetting my phone, and reproducing the problem, I decided to install some of the applications I had, that I really did want again. One of the applications, a CalDAV Sync Client (a feature which I call essential) was no longer available to my phone, even though, the application had not been updated and I had applied the Samsung update for my phone (which I later found, only fixed SMS issues, an update I wouldn’t have applied if I was able to see the changelog).  The Android Market will not tell me WHY I can no longer install it, so I’m lost for words, and without a fairly important application/feature that I used.

To top it off, this revelation happened, just as I did some reading into the Android development platform and started complimenting it after seeing how ‘good’ it was.