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Not so smart phone
22 November 2012 | by 
My Motorola Milestone 2 (which I think is known in some places as a Motorola Droid) has started acting up. I’ve had it more than a year now so it is out of warranty.
A couple of days ago I picked it up one evening and it was stone cold dead. Pulling the battery made no difference so I dropped it into the multimedia base and when it came to life it showed the battery was at 0%. The phone sleeps in the multimedia base so it is always fully charged and there is normally 60% left by the evening unless I’ve been running some GPS applications, which for just this reason I don’t. How odd.
The next day after a full charge the phone appeared to be OK. A couple of hours later I scrolled to the page where the Gmail app lives and its icon had changed to a box with a gear wheel in front of it. When I tried to run it I got a message “Application not installed.” Even odder.
I tried the tech support guy’s standard fix which is to switch it off and then switch it on again. To my relief this did the trick. The Gmail icon was back again and the app seemed to be working normally. Until this morning.
When I got up I was surprised that the phone wasn’t winking its green light at me to show there was email waiting. Had no-one at all commented to my blog? After breakfast I turned on the shack PC and lo and behold there were 4 messages in my inbox. The phone still showed nothing. Eventually I checked the account settings and every one of my Google accounts had the “Synchronize Gmail” setting turned off. How very peculiar.
I turned sync on again and the phone is checking my mail as normal. But I just wonder what it’s going to do next?
5 Responses to “Not so smart phone”
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Hey Julian,
I think I might one of the last persons in the US (well, my wife too) who doesn’t own a smartphone. We have plain ol’ vanilla Samsungs with some bells and whistles – but not too many.
Larry W2LJ
Try reprograming the phone…d
ont know your carrier but Verizon is it *282 check with your carrier
Good luck
Julian,
I have the Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone, I have been in smartphone mode since my first iPhone, the iPhone 3. Don’t know if you have tried this trick or not, but one that works. With the phone on, pull the battery..kinda like a hard reset, but it does do the trick. You may have to reset a couple items, usually everything is fine, but sometimes some things may have to be reset. Hope this helps, hope you have a great day.
Hi Juilian, have you tried/run a virus or malware checker on your smartphone? You may also need to replace your smartphone battery if it’s not holding it’s charge.
I’ve had a droid for about thee years and have found that I have to clear the phone entirely about once a year. Have to reload my apps and reconfigure it afterwards of course but all your apps will be listed on the app store. You can call your carrier to walk you through it.
I have also found that the built in browser that came with mine definitely slows things down every once in a while. So I clear it entirely. You cannot delete the app itself but I toss everything else. Loose my favourites but that is not such a big deal.
Then there is the odd app that is either a real energy hog, data hog or just ‘gums up the works’. Try tossing any apps you have loaded recently. I had one “stand alone” game that was chewing through 10 megs a day. Builds up when all I have is one gig/month.
other than that… I’ve the original battery and it seems to be holding out fine.