31 replies to this topic

[+Jombi]

I've had my black HTC 8X for 1 month and 5 days. The first 3 weeks were absolutely wonderful. I was amazed at the speed, loved getting my 4G back (whole different story with Verizon), and the general feel was great. I still had a few reservations which slightly annoy me.

• You can't take the battery out. Why in the world can't the battery be taken out? What if my phone freezes and the buttons aren't responding? I'd have to wait until the battery drains to recharge it. The battery life is awesome though, but in this case it is pretty annoying.
  
• No additional memory slots???
  
• Shotty SIM card slot. Even though I didn't have problems with it in the beginning, I was worried about it simply due to the "looseness" feel of that little panel holding it in.
  
• The keyboard is a 5/10 overall. The big downer is that it doesn't have arrows to navigate the text you've just written. So when I want to go add a word mid-way through a paragraph, I either have to keep trying to press that magic spot on the screen between words, or I just touch the word next to it and retype. Difficult to explain, but I think 8X users would feel me on this.

Enter January 15th. For the past week I have had nothing but problems with this phone.

• Phone randomly restarts whenever it wants to. I was browsing a forum on it yesterday and out of nowhere it started the shutdown process and told me "goodbye" . Then it proceeded to repeat this for the next 10 minutes. Luckily the 8X has a great loading time...which only got my hopes up for a few seconds before it told me "goodbye" again.
  
• Every time I unplug from the charging cable my SIM card goes "missing." A quick fix is to power the phone down and reboot. It only takes maybe 45 seconds to fully boot up, so no biggie right? Well, when I reboot the SIM card is apparently still on vacation. I try waiting, sometimes upwards to 30 minutes. No success. I reboot and repeat the previous steps until it starts working again.
  
• SIM card also goes "missing" randomly throughout the day.
  
• Those times my SIM card is not detected I cannot send text messages, make phone calls, or use any sort of application that requires data. I don't understand why everything must rely on my SIM card now? With my Thunderbolt I could yank the 4G SIM card out (worked, but Verizon refused to replace the phone...long story) and still text, browse the internet, etc. Granted it was only 1x...but I could still do it.
  
• This morning I woke up and checked my phone for messages. The back-lit touch buttons on the bottom were all lit up, but the phone was not responsive. Normally you could yank the battery out for a second and replace it and be fine. Well, I couldn't access the battery and none of the buttons wanted to do anything. So I just waited. Still hasn't changed.

I'm starting to be fed up with this phone. Between work and school, I haven't had a spare few hours to go to Verizon to have them look at it. If I get done with my paper early today, I'll take it. But its a little frustrating to say the least.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues?

Edit:
And here's some of the things I've experienced or see pretty often with friends:
http://forums.wpcent...ed-its-own.html
http://forums.wpcent...hone-calls.html (this is one issue I have)
http://forums.wpcent...verizon-8x.html (same as above)

[micro]

Sounds to me like you have a defective phone. I've had my 8x since november. Has none of these problems.

[+Jombi]

micro, on 25 January 2013 - 15:24, said:

Sounds to me like you have a defective phone. I've had my 8x since november. Has none of these problems.

Glad you've had none of these. Its frustrating because I just didn't have the time to go get a replacement up until today. I'm sure a replacement would fix it, but I don't want some refurbed phone.

Guess we'll see how the Verizon trip goes.

[mr_sock_00]

Check these links out

http://forums.wpcent...verizon-8x.html


http://forums.wpcent...rts-itself.html

[logicwin]

for the keyboard just hold down in the text box till you get the I pointer allowing you to place it where you want in the sentence

[Biohead]

A SIM card is the link to the network - that's your identity. So that's why you can't call/text/do anything network related when the SIM card isn't there. This is the case on a GSM network, it's different on CDMA as that identity is built into the phone (I think it's called the ESN?). That's perfectly normal behaviour (not that the sim card vanished, but when it does that you're unable to use the network).

Is there no hardware button combination that forces a reboot? Much like on an iPhone, you hold power+home to force a reboot if the handset ever crashes.

All in all though, it does sound you either got a defective phone - or HTC have some serious build quality issues.

[AJerman]

Volume down and power to reboot. All phones have a hardware interrupt that works regardless of if the system is responding.

As for the SIM card issues, that sounds like a more serious hardware issue. It hasn't gotten wet, right? If not, bring it back to the store and see if they will replace it since it's so new. I don't know Verizon's policies though because I've never used them.

[Colin McGregor]

So why didn't you look up the phone and see it had no removable battery or expansion slot before getting it?

[BajiRav]

Jombi, on 25 January 2013 - 15:18, said:

The keyboard is a 5/10 overall. The big downer is that it doesn't have arrows to navigate the text you've just written. So when I want to go add a word mid-way through a paragraph, I either have to keep trying to press that magic spot on the screen between words, or I just touch the word next to it and retype. Difficult to explain, but I think 8X users would feel me on this.

Uh? You can just tap+hold anywhere and then drag the cursor to whatever place you want. There is no magic spot or black magic involved.

[+Jombi]

AJerman, on 25 January 2013 - 15:56, said:

Volume down and power to reboot. All phones have a hardware interrupt that works regardless of if the system is responding.

As for the SIM card issues, that sounds like a more serious hardware issue. It hasn't gotten wet, right? If not, bring it back to the store and see if they will replace it since it's so new. I don't know Verizon's policies though because I've never used them.

Yep, I figured the button combo was the same as with other phones - power + volume down. Never exposed to moisture beyond the air. I just got back from the store and they replaced my SIM card to see if that fixed the data issue. Guess I need to wait a bit to see if that helps.

Colin McGregor, on 25 January 2013 - 16:03, said:

So why didn't you look up the phone and see it had no removable battery or expansion slot before getting it?

I'm sorry, if you don't want to contribute something positive, don't post at all. I knew it didn't come with a slot for an additional SD card, but what I didn't realize is how much room it had after installing the needed apps and running my email/skydrive on it. I thought 16GB would be plenty, but it just isn't the case.

Thanks to the few useful posts here.

[jakem1]

vcfan, on 25 January 2013 - 15:53, said:

4.the downer is the user that doesnt know how to use the keyboard. if you press and hold,you can precisely choose where the cursor goes. blaming something without knowing how it works is just stupid.

To be fair to the OP, this is one of the few things in Windows Phone that isn't immediately obvious and isn't easy to discover.

Jombi, on 25 January 2013 - 17:25, said:

I'm sorry, if you don't want to contribute something positive, don't post at all. I knew it didn't come with a slot for an additional SD card, but what I didn't realize is how much room it had after installing the needed apps and running my email/skydrive on it. I thought 16GB would be plenty, but it just isn't the case.

How many emails are you storing on your phone and can it be reduced? For instance, you might want to consider only syncing mail that arrived in the last week or fortnight if you're not doing that already.

Skydrive shouldn't use any space on your phone.

[+Jombi]

jakem1, on 25 January 2013 - 17:39, said:

To be fair to the OP, this is one of the few things in Windows Phone that isn't immediately obvious and isn't easy to discover.

Yes, it is not very apparent that this is possible. I rarely used this feature on my Thunderbolt, but its one of those things I just figured was there. I don't find it as useful as the arrows though. That is just my opinion though.

jakem1, on 25 January 2013 - 17:39, said:

How many emails are you storing on your phone and can it be reduced? For instance, you might want to consider only syncing mail that arrived in the last week or fortnight if you're not doing that already.

Skydrive shouldn't use any space on your phone.

I funnel 4 emails to my phone. 1 school, 1 competition league, 1 personal, 1 community. I do a lot of work from my phone when I'm not around a computer, so keeping docs local helps tremendously. Since Verizon cut my unlimited data when I renewed, I don't have the option of keeping everything on the cloud and re-downloading it whenever I need it. I've tried to keep data usage low by not downloading the images in emails, but sometimes it can't be avoided.

I appreciate your response though! I do need to look into ways to cut back on data usage and storage at the same time.

[Anaron]

Cleaned

[pickypg]

Jombi, on 25 January 2013 - 15:18, said:

• This morning I woke up and checked my phone for messages. The back-lit touch buttons on the bottom were all lit up, but the phone was not responsive. Normally you could yank the battery out for a second and replace it and be fine. Well, I couldn't access the battery and none of the buttons wanted to do anything. So I just waited. Still hasn't changed.

If your phone locks up, then hold the power and camera buttons for about 10-20 seconds. It should reboot. Before Portico, which largely fixed Bluetooth issues, I had a Bluetooth-related lock-up that required me to hold the buttons for much longer than 20 seconds (something must have been really stuck).

As for the SIM issues, have you tried reseating the SIM card? I went through two bad Lumia 920s because AT&T literally jammed the SIM card into the SIM card tray up-side-down, which caused unfixable issues. Since your phone is able to use the SIM occasionally, it's clearly not flipped, but perhaps it is not properly seated.

My brother's Lumia 920 has been suffering from the random restart as well, but I have no solution for it. My other brother, his wife, and even my mother have a Lumia 920, and none of us are seeing that issue except him. I can say that he is understandably quite frustrated by the automatic reboots.

Finally with the bandwidth usage, I do not use my phone for downloading documents quite like you do, but you may be able to use it more than you think. I suspect that you have 2 - 4 GB of data, so just keep an eye of the data meter. There should be an app available on Verizon WP8 phones: Data Sense. It should keep you informed about how much data you have left for your billing cycle. Unfortunately the app is apparently quite network specific, so I don't believe it's out on AT&T for me to be able to test.

Regardless of what you end up doing, I hope Verizon swaps it out if it's busted.

[GP007]

My older LG Optimus 7 had that weird SIM issue, basically if I fell into a dead spot and lost my 3g connection then it sometimes wouldn't try to reconnect and only give me the "emergency call" option and SIM Error message. What I did though, instead of restarting it, I would turn on flight mode for 2-3 seconds and then turn flight mode off. This makes the phone rescan and it would then pickup the SIM card again and connect. Way faster for me than rebooting.

Now on my new 8X which I've had since December, no such problems, and I went on a trip to the US and it connected and roamed just fine since it's a unlocked device. I was able to connect to both T-Mobile and at&t networks at times.