I've had an Android G1. I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I've had it longer than my contract so for the most part it's been awesome. For the last 6 months or so it's been problematic. The last incident was today. For no good reason the Home button quits working. I assume it was broken because there was no error message. Then I find out the phone button isn't working which got me thinking, what are the odds two buttons would die in one afternoon and if it were a hardware problem why would I only see the option to turn off the phone when holding the down the "hang up" button?
I decided to investigate this and I'm not the only one with this problem and it appears to have been around awhile. I have 1.6 and people at least up to version 2.2 have the same problem. For the most part people have suggested the factory reset. I did not want to do that (more on that later) so I searched further and I found quick and easy solution.
These are the steps to fix your Android phone if you find your phone and home button not working:
1. Go to Settings -> Applications -> Manage Application and find the entry for Google Apps.
2. Select it and press the "Clear Data" button and the "Clear Cache" button if you have a built up cache.
3. Hit the back button until you get to the home screen.
4. Go back into Settings and then Data Synchronization and when you get then it will ask you to log back in with your Google Account so do it.
Once that's done your phone will sync up and then everything should work just fine.
Now as I understand this is because the Google Apps data gets corrupt. I can live with the fact sometimes data gets screwed up but shouldn't the phone tell me something is wrong rather than say absolutely nothing and instead make it look like the hardware is broken if you're not wise enough to take notice to the lack options if you try shutting down the phone? Also why should that data then stop you from being able to put the phone into flight mode? That's basic functionality that shouldn't have anything to do with your account.
The thing is this isn't the first problem with the phone that I've had. Like I said I've really enjoyed my phone and I believe a lot of my problems (aside this one) is down to the fact I haven't rooted the phone so I'm on the ancient 1.6 thanks to HTC not wanting to provide for more updates.
Roughly 6 months ago my phone just died. I believe it is because of an app update and only surfaced some time later because I turned the phone off and tried turning it back on. This could only be solved by a factory reset. So now I don't install custom apps because clearly not everything I see will actually be good for my version of Android.
That's bad enough but then I heard about Angry Birds. My initial search said it should run on my G1. So I try downloading it. It won't and gives me an error about being unable to download the app before starting the download. Give the error I received logically I assume it's a network error and keep trying. It keeps failing. So then logically I assume T-Mobile won't allow me to download big apps over 3G and I try over Wifi. Still nothing.
The best I can figure out is that something tells the phone that I'm not going to be able to run the game so it won't download it. Thanks for the helpful and informative message, guys!
I also had an issue where Google Maps wouldn't run and in fact would always crash when the phone started up without me even attempting to use it. That lasted for ages until an update to the app appears to have fixed it.
What annoys me is that Google is supposed to be home to the best and brightest and they still can't sort this stuff out? I don't care so much about stuff not running on my phone but the lack of useful error messages if any at all. With those well paid, well educated and in some cases big names at Google I would expect this sort of thing to be obvious and taken care of and I don't expect that from version 1.6 to at least version 2.2 that the home button will just die for no reason leaving people guessing how to fix it.
Android phones are cheap but I still get locked into a contract and my experience says so far that it can be problematic more so as the phone gets older and the vendor refuses to update it. Not everyone cares to root their phone and they certainly shouldn't expect mainstream consumers to do it. If I don't want to what are the odds my parents or grandmother would want to?
There is clearly an issue even if it isn't massive with market fragmentation and the Android market. I do have an issue with the cost of the iPhone and I'm not really all that happy with Apple's control over their app store. However as I have to consider upgrading my phone at some point I'm really considering the iPhone especially if T-Mobile will be willing to make me a deal and even if I'm not terribly keen on Apple's control I'm starting to understand exactly why they do it.
So I may very well go with an iPhone until Google does something about their problems. I think they do need a stricter system to determine whether the app should run on the phone, they need to sort out how the phone tells (or doesn't tell) the user what the problem is and I really think they need to find a way to ensure vendors provide more updates to the phones. Getting vendors to update alone should sort a lo of the problems.
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