Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Omnia i910 Frozen Like a RocketPop (or, When is a Mobile Phone a Hose?)

what's playing: "The Wrong Band" by Tori Amos

Last week, the night before I got on a plane to LA, I powered down my Omnia after recharging was complete (wanted to retain full juice for the flight). When I woke up in the morning and powered on the phone... it was frozen. Once the phone was powered up (after going through the boot up animation and the WinMo green screen), it would freeze with either a blank screen (just tiny icons up top) or the screen as it should appear (but not functioning) or somewhere in between (sometimes almost there but missing, say, the calendar).

I tried the soft reset and I tried holding the soft reset, but the phone would always freeze after reaching the Today screen. The power button didn't work at all (wouldn't power down the phone). The only way to power down was to remove the battery. So once the phone was frozen, I had two options: soft reset button or remove the battery.

After trying various combinations of things for about an hour (holding soft reset while removing battery, removing battery, soft reset held for different amounts of time, etc.), I finally got the phone back to functional condition by removing the battery, plugging the phone into my laptop, reinsterting the battery, and powering the device up.

For those of you looking for a solution to your frozen Omnia problem, don't get too excited by my find.

Last night my phone froze up again, and this time, nothing I did would fix it. I finally took it into the Verizon store this morning, and they simply replaced the phone. They were going to just swap it, but I was all like "Um... that phone has my bank passwords, website passwords, and a bunch of other stuff on it." They didn't seem to think that was an issue, but I made them look up the Hard Reset key combo so I could wipe the phone before handing it over. I assume somebody who REALLY wanted to could probably still find some stuff on there, but I'm hoping Verizon does at least a DECENT job of wiping the phone before it reaches it's next phase of life. Plus, I didn't really have all my bank and web passwords on there, just my Gmail and Ebay... so not too terribly critical.

Now I have to load the new Omnia with all my hacks and mods again, so that will be kind of a pain. It does give me the opportunity to install only the things I want though, so I'll be putting together a "this is what I loaded onto my phone now that I know what I'm doing" post. Keep an eye out for that one in the next couple of days.

Also, the previous Omnia had a Zagg Shield on it. I've heard good things about Zagg's policy for replacing the shield, so I guess I'm about to find out first hand how that goes. It's also kind of a pain to have to spend another hour installing the shield.

I'll keep you posted.

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