Why I'm beginning to dislike my HTC 8X

[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.wpcentral.com/htc-8x/210010-htc-8x-died-its-own.html

http://forums.wpcentral.com/htc-8x/208839-htc-8x-issue-text-email-phone-calls.html (this is one issue I have)

http://forums.wpcentral.com/htc-8x/206093-invalid-sim-error-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]

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.wpcentral.com/htc-8x/206093-invalid-sim-error-verizon-8x.html

http://forums.wpcentral.com/windows-phone-8/201292-htc-8-x-restarts-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]

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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.

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.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Cleaned

[pickytech]

• 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.

[George P Global Moderator]

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.

[tsupersonic]

Some of your complaints aren't even valid. Do some research before you buy the phone - and if you did, you would've known it had no removable battery, and no microSD card slot!

Other than that, try to get an exchange from Verizon.

[George P Global Moderator]

Off-topic, as a fellow 8X owner, does anyone else use one of these battery monitor apps that give you a % on a tile and the lock screen? I'm wondering if they're worth it or if they actually add to battery drain.

[Jombi]

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.

Yep, great advice! I love the DataSense app that comes standard. When I took it to the store today they replaced the SIM card, thinking perhaps it was damaged or faulty. Its a waiting game now to see if it fixes my issues.

Not sure about the random restarts though. Maybe the SIM problem is related, but I doubt it. And the force reboot is Power+Vol.Down.

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.

I did try the flight mode process, but it wouldn't work sometimes and other times it would work. Pretty frustrating to say the least!

Thanks for the tips guys! Keep'em coming :)

[NateB1]

I had a few software issues with my HTC 8x, including random reboots, nothing showing up in Windows Explorer when it was plugged in, and occasional SIM card issues. After the WP8 update was pushed to my phone about a week ago, all those problems have disappeared.

I still have battery life issues, and I'm not happy about the paint peeling situation, but I'm pretty sure those problems are inherent in the phone's design, and can't be fixed.

I also don't understand why they didn't put in a micro SD slot for the upper-end HTC 8X model - 16 GB just isn't a lot of space, especially when it comes down to storing offline maps and music on the phone.

[Jombi]

Some of your complaints aren't even valid. Do some research before you buy the phone - and if you did, you would've known it had no removable battery, and no microSD card slot!

Other than that, try to get an exchange from Verizon.

Read my other posts in this thread. I can complain about anything I want to. I knew what I bought, and I'm happy with it. Just because I have a few issues with it doesn't mean its a worthless phone. The non-removable battery should never be an issue if the SIM problem never arose. And the SD card, I already explained that in another post.

I had a few software issues with my HTC 8x, including random reboots, nothing showing up in Windows Explorer when it was plugged in, and occasional SIM card issues. After the WP8 update was pushed to my phone about a week ago, all those problems have disappeared.

I still have battery life issues, and I'm not happy about the paint peeling situation, but I'm pretty sure those problems are inherent in the phone's design, and can't be fixed.

I also don't understand why they didn't put in a micro SD slot for the upper-end HTC 8X model - 16 GB just isn't a lot of space, especially when it comes down to storing offline maps and music on the phone.

I haven't checked on the update...might need to do that today :p

Yes, the 16GB just isn't nearly enough for those reasons as well.

[pickytech]

And the force reboot is Power+Vol.Down.

Good catch. I must have been thinking about the maintenance mode, which I believe is volume down, power and camera, and then finally just two of them. Regardless, I am glad you pointed it out that I had it wrong so that hopefully someone sees the correct buttons to press.

If you have not yet updated to Portico, then you will definitely want too.

[jakem1]

Off-topic, as a fellow 8X owner, does anyone else use one of these battery monitor apps that give you a % on a tile and the lock screen? I'm wondering if they're worth it or if they actually add to battery drain.

I don't know if they reduce your battery life too much although they are running as a background task so will use power. However, I tried a couple and didn't find them useful because they only update their live tile every 20 or 30 minutes.

[Richio]

As to the battery in phone thing, look at all the iPhones, they all have it built in. Just saying.

But yeah taking out the battery is soooo much better

[Jombi]

Having the same issues with the new SIM card. Guess I have to go back over there and get a replacement tomorrow.

[articuno1au]

I tl;dr'ed the replies but:

There's a hard (soft) reset key combo to restart the phone if it locks up. Volume Down + Power + Camera is the default, but HTC can change it.

No comment.

I'd say the looseness of the panel could be related to the sim issues you are having. Loose sim holder + sim not registering seems like a no brainer.

The keyboard issue I have to agree with. WP7 had the best soft keyboard I had ever used. WP8 has regressed. Far and away the most disappointing part of WP8.

The random shutdown issue has a collection of software related issues. A bit of googling could help you identify what apps can cause this, but I agree it's not great.

See my sim comment above.

Again.

Again again.

It's so you can swap in and out of phones. It's a much better system than having the phone registered to the network :\

The hardlock can be fixed with the key combo.

My 920 has been great, but has the lock up issues, in particular with bluetooth devices.

Would be worth taking your phone back I think.

EDIT::

The phone dropping out and not reconnecting to signal issue is caused by a roaming bug in the software (prevalent on Telstra phones in Australia). The flight mode toggle seems to fix this for the most part >.>

I have a list of all the bugs elevated to T3 support with Telstra, and the list is extensive :| If you are having problems getting a picture message out, if the pixel count is greater than 2MP, it will fail (regardless of the network size limits).

There are bugs >.>