My list of major Omnia bugs in 5 days of usage

[Guest giancian]

Hello to everyone in this forum!

I bought the Omnia about 5 days ago, it came with an old spanish ROM which I updated to DXHH1 immediately...

I started experiencing the following problems:

-After a while of using the phone, when turning the screen off with the power button, the backlight would not go off (but the screen would)... this would only be noticeable indoors and became a battery drainer.. I had to soft reset the thing for it to start functioning properly again.

-The motion detector would stop working suddenly and the screen would not rotate automatically anymore. A soft reset would not fix this, only a hard reset.

-Sometimes when pressing the power button to bring the phone back from standby, the screen would not turn on. The strange thing is the phone was working, you could call it and it would ring, but the screen was dead. Only a soft reset (with the stylus, couldn't reset with the power button) would fix this. ("Black Screen of Death")

Right... so I upgraded to the DXHI2 rom, so now I'm experiencing the following:

-Very frequently, the phone just freezes. You can turn on and off the screen but the buttons and screen input stop working. Only way to fix is a soft reset.

-Refreshing the Touch Player's library with a lot of music in the Internal Storage crashes the program. It's unusable, have to use WMP.

-Keep getting the "Black Screen of Death" mentioned above, although less frequently.

-Very low signal in both ROMS

-"FIXES":The backlight problem seems to have been fixed. And until now, I haven't had the screen rotation problem.

Right... so is this phone as buggy as hell? What is going on here? It seems a lottery, I have to keep checking my phone at all times to see if it's working properly, for fear of losing important calls or messages. It's a great phone really (when it works) but come on...

I've been doing some experimenting, installing programs one at a time to see if the phone crashes... and using the phone with and without a memory card installed to see if it makes a difference... I'll let you know if I find anything useful, but in the meantime, the OMNIA is a VERY UNRELIABLE AND EXPENSIVE piece of crap.

[Guest OsmanMuslu]

having the exact same problems but different thoughts. fitting an all-in-one phone is much harder to do with Windows mobile when it is compared to a speacial mobile phone firmware.That is why i think.And also that is why wm and the phone's own rom is updateable.so if you compare it to iphone ( seems to be done by everyone nowadays ) they have been on the market for a very long time.but omnia is just a little handsome baby ;) waiting to grow up to charm everyone soon.dont worry :wacko:

[Guest giancian]

Now, don't get me wrong. I absolutely love Windows Mobile as a platform, in spite of its limitations (mostly interface related)... I've had lots of Windows Mobile devices and have loved them all ... but the Omnia has been impossibly unreliable. I need at least a stable phone!

Has anyone had problems with storage cards? I've been using the Omnia without one for a few hours and the freezes and crashes seem to be absent (mind you, it's only been a few hours, anything can happen)... it's a new 4gb card. I'll keep trying and see what happens...

[Guest Ericmky]

Now, don't get me wrong. I absolutely love Windows Mobile as a platform, in spite of its limitations (mostly interface related)... I've had lots of Windows Mobile devices and have loved them all ... but the Omnia has been impossibly unreliable. I need at least a stable phone!

Has anyone had problems with storage cards? I've been using the Omnia without one for a few hours and the freezes and crashes seem to be absent (mind you, it's only been a few hours, anything can happen)... it's a new 4gb card. I'll keep trying and see what happens...

Giancian

when you upgrade your omnia to HI2 ROM, previously you make a hard reset and after the upgrade too??

in all this forum recommended do this procedure and normally after that you don´t have any problem with your Omnia.

i have the DXHI2 ROM and don´t have any of your problem.

Regards

[Guest OsmanMuslu]

my omnia seems to be stable with dxhi1 for now.i use my applications stably , surfing on wlan without a heat problem really really fast i mean it.it is even fast as my laptop when using google maps.only major problems are with the gps battery drain and heating ; and the screen go black when standby and dont come back without a soft reset as you said. only 2 problems i complain about so far and it is quite good for me.My storage is 2 gb and im using it without any probs but i hear people buy 16 gigas in my country which all works fine.im gonna try it too if i need more space.

[Guest Reuben (MY)]

giancian,

i'd suggest you to do following upgrade since your phone appear to be corrupted from day 1... or send back your device to the shop you bought it for warranty. alternately you can do following:

1) download DXHG4, DXHH3, DXHI2 these 3 firmwares,

2) flash it with G4 for the start.. and hard reset it once or twice after successful install

- G4 have good battery life among all official release (i mean officially from samsung website)

3) flash it with H3 official rom and hard reset again

- H3 is the latest official rom found in samsung website

4) finally flash it with this DXHI2 and hard reset.

- I2 is the rom that i'm most comfortable with at this moment, with good battery life and quite stable application handling

it's better if you can fully charge your battery before doing the above.

the reason flashing so many round is because, you won't know what's in each firmware, and cannot be 100% sure that each firmware consist of ALL required rom update file. so since these 3 roms are best choosen among others, just flash it, and hope it can solve more of your problem

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

Flashing DXHI2 then hard resetting is sufficient, no need to jump thru those hoops!

P

[Guest giancian]

Right, thanks for the recommendations, I'll try to flash other ROMs and see what happens...

I'm trying right now another older 2Gb SD card I had lying around... if by tomorrow I have the same problems, I'll try those ROMS.

Let's hope Samsung tightens up the Omnia in future ROMS... I had an HTC Touch Diamond that drove me nuts... I tried one recently with a new ROM and HTC managed to make the thing beatifully usable and fast... I sure hope Samsung can do the same to the Omnia before they forget it in favor of those new 8 MP devices coming out! ;)

Cheers, thanks again, I'll keep you posted if I discover anything useful with the memory card experiments :wacko:

[Guest Reuben (MY)]

ya most important for upgrade is hard reset... as paul recomended, maybe just try HI2 and hard reset see how it goes.

[Guest giancian]

I've done so many hard resets I've lost count! So that's not solving the issue. I guess that leaves the following options:

-It's third-party software related

-It's hardware related (let's hope not!)

-It's a faulty memory card (SDHC 4gb card)

This last option would actually make some sense... maybe when the Omnia tries to search for something in the card it gets stuck due to a faulty sector or something, and the whole phone crashes.

So I'm testing right now with no 3rd party software and a different SD 2gb memory card installed (not SDHC). So far it hasn't crashed (in half a day of normal phone usage).

I'll then test:

1) No 3rd party software and SDHC card installed

2) 3rd party software and SD card installed

3) 3rd party software and SDHC card installed

Whew!!! I'll let you know what I find!

[Guest juliangun4ev]

Hello to everyone in this forum!

I bought the Omnia about 5 days ago, it came with an old spanish ROM which I updated to DXHH1 immediately...

So can you change your ROM non only english-english but spanish->english too(or italian->english)?!?!

My omnia is the italian one(italian language)..can i change my ROM and put DXHI2 english one ???

p.s.and the proceed remain (activSync+drivers+DXHI2.exe.) the same??

Thank you responding me!!! ;)

[Guest prp]

Giancian

when you upgrade your omnia to HI2 ROM, previously you make a hard reset and after the upgrade too??

in all this forum recommended do this procedure and normally after that you don´t have any problem with your Omnia.

i have the DXHI2 ROM and don´t have any of your problem.

Regards

Me too after flashing to hi2 no problems at all even without making hard reset. Well the only problem i have is when i use igo8 and close it after this tomtom or garmin is not detecting gps - com3 but its ok after soft reset.

Edited October 4, 2008 by prp

[Guest jclsm]

Hi,

I'm running the DXHI2 and no problems until now.

[Guest Reuben (MY)]

if you suspect you're having faulty SD card, you can always slot it to your computer and do a check with windows tool.

[Guest Quist09]

If I were in your shoes, I think I would've had the device replaced on warranty.

Still, early on, I did have some problems with the unit freezing up on me, both with the screen on and when in standby and I found that some of my 3rd party software had to be installed to the device storage instead of My Storage or a memory card to run properly. Apparently the connection with these off-device memory units is not maintained to 100% when it slips into standby or other combinations of things happen.

That said, I try to install all the software I can on My Storage except:

- anything that is or can be suspected of requiring low-level system information such as task managers, file explorers, other utilities such as the SIP selector, etc.

- Mortscript - if you are going to have it monitor anything and wait for a trigger, install it to the device

- messaging software including fring and Skype, if you run this from an off-device memory unit it WILL cause a lock-up in conjunction with standby or other app usage. Installing them to device storage resolves the issues

Anyway, good luck. Hope you resolve your issues or don't have any problems getting the unit replaced/fixed.