Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

So I got a new phone before leaving Denmark for vacation in the States. MarkJ posted a comment to that post detailing some problems he has experienced with the phone, namely that it misses phone calls and voice mail notifications. I haven’t had that problem with my phone, but I have experienced that same problem with other phones. Both my Qtek 9090 and my Imate JasJar has had similar problems. Sometimes you wouldn’t get calls of SMS (Text Messages) before you yourself made a call or send an SMS, after which all of sudden it would pour in with messages and sometimes missed calls notifications. Weird! The commonality between the phones is of course that they run Windows Mobile. But apparently these phones aren’t the only ones with these problems. During the time I used the JasJar it got a problem with the headphone jack getting stuck. Therefore I borrowed a phone from my friend Tais – a Nokia — and lo and behold I sometimes had the same problems with missed calls. Another friend of mine (Lars) has had the same problems with both Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones and on a completely differnent Tele ISP than me.

So what seems to be the problem? I don’t know but I have a theory. I think that sometimes the phone gets disconnected from the network, but the phone doesn’t realize this; it still thinks its connected. Because the network thinks the phone is disconnected it doesn’t forward calls and SMS’es to it. Then when you send an SMS or makes a call, the phone connects directly and the network finds that the phone is online again, therefore pushing the SMS’es and calls to the phone. I don’t know what makes this disconnection of the phone from the network, maybe heavy load. But nevertheless it sucks!

Anyway, after returning to Denmark I found out that a lot of people had send me SMS’es while I was away, but I hadn’t received most of them. MarkJ is in the States, and reports these problems, I too was in the States and experiencing SMS receival problems. Maybe there’s a problem with the phone in the US?
Scouting the net I found this post on MoDaCo’s forums:

Thats what HTC sent me today via mail … 

“We are indeed aware of the issue, and it is mainly to do with compatibility with the 850/1900 MHz bands in North America, but you should not experience this issue anywhere else.

There may be an update available at some point in the future which addresses this, but first will be a dedicated North American version of the 8500, which will solve the problem for our North American customers.

Any update would take the form of a ROM update which would completely wipe the device.”

This totally sucks! Especially because I’m going back to the States in 2 weeks. This’ll totally render my phone useless until they manage to get an update out, which could take months. I think my best bet will be to take my Imate JasJar with me, at least that one works for sure.

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