Droid 2 sends blank/garbled text (sms)

[elmerfudd]

Hello,

I have a Droid 2 phone which sometimes sends text messages that are either blank or random symbols/characters. Here is the fact pattern:

1. Problem never occurred with my old LG phone.
2. Problem doesn?t occur all the time, just several times a day.
3. The texts can be read on the senders phone but not on the recipients phone.
4. The recipients of the bad texts are spread across different carriers ? not just one.
5. The recipients of the bad texts are spread across a spectrum of phone types.
6. The chance of a bad text being received increases when the text message is a long one.
7. The chance of a bad text showing up as being ?blank? increase if the recipients phone is older.
8. The chance of a bad text showing up as being ?symbols? increases if the recipients phone is newer.
9. The Droid 2 phone in question was replaced with a second brand new Droid 2 and the problem continues to happen.
10. The Droid 2 phones have been checked out with Verizon Wireless Tech Support who says there is no problem (Ha!).
11. Verizon Wireless has stated that they know of no network issue or phone issue which could be causing this to happen.
12. Verizon Wireless Tech has stated there is no user setting in place which would cause this to happen.
13. Motorola tech support has stated they know of no issue with this phone which would cause this to happen.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated as I?m very close to junking this phone and going back to my old LG phone.

EF

 

[thebizz]

if your still in your 30 days either switch phones or get a different one. its that easy sounds like you have a bug in your system i havent heard complaints about that but it seems like a software bug. what firmware are you running

 

[elmerfudd]

Still in 30 day warranty. I already switched phones once (traded in droid2 for another new droid2). Handset is running the most up to date firmware (up to date as of 3 days ago that is).

 

[pool_shark]

The closest I've come to hearing anything like this was the random weird messages that people have received, and someone had messages with a date of 1969 that couldn't be deleted.

I have had no problems with sms on my D2.

 

[gixxer1397]

Just had this happen to me, I sent a message to a friend on my d2 to his I beleive iphone and he resent it back to me and every other letter seemed to be a random character from questions marks to pound signs. It has only happened the one time though.

 

[BBash]

I sent a text from my D2 twice to my daughter who is on my plan, (both Verizon) and she said it was a bunch of symbols. Hasn't said anything lately, that was about 15 days ago.

 

[dapostol]

I have been getting the same issue ... seems to be related to whether I'm using the physical keyboard or the multi-touch keyboard and whether the words have any punctuation marks in them or not (such as an apostrophe) ... once a word with a punctuation mark is chosen from the multi-touch keyboard not only is the punctuation mark replaced with a symbol, the ENTIRE message is garbled. If I use ONLY the physical keyboard ... there is no issue. I have only had the phone for TWO days but it is ALREADY a HUGE problem. I chose this phone (as opposed to continuing with the BlackBerry Storm) to have the OPTION of using the physical keyboard, not to make it MANDATORY that I do so. I use this phone for both work and personal use, I was willing to live with the hassle of not being able to sync my contacts and calendar directly from Outlook but THIS makes it impossible for me to be able to use this phone ... obviously this is not an 'isolated' issue or there wouldn't be as many posts to this thread as there are ... are there any solutions in the pipes? After spending MONTHS researching the pro's and con's of switching from BlackBerry to Android, agonizing over the CONTINUED reliability of the touch-screen technology, living with a VERY sadly lacking battery life and spending the last TWO days attempting to 'personalize' and 'acquaint' myself with the phone ... the idea that I will have to take it back, spend hours in the Verizon Wireless Store, and RE-'personalize' and RE-'acquaint' myself with another phone is infuriating. It's enough to make me SERIOUSLY consider switching carriers just to get the iPhone ... whose attributes are what we all seem to be looking for in a phone ANYWAY!

 

[elmerfudd]

Droid 2 garbled text - resolved (somewhat)

As suggested on another forum, I've been using the handcent app to do texting. Been using it for the last several weeks and the garbled text problem hasn't presented itself any more.

I know this isn't a full resolution of the problem but it works for me.

 

[darrylmendo]

Did you guys use accented letters? I think that's the cause. It only happened to me one time. I sent the same msg six times and it kept doing that. Finally I changed the accented "e" to a regular "e" and it sent just fine.

 

[Superspy68]

I am having the same problems with my Droid X. It is very aggravating.

 

[huchetable]

Handcent

I had the exact same issue as ElmerFudd. All the same things held true. I downloaded Handcent SMS (it's free - yay) and haven't had the problem since. I had to override the Droid text message system, but it was easy to do. It's a shame we have to go to a third party to fix a problem that Motorola won't recognize. I'm glad I found a fix, though, and I would recommend it.

 

[androide]

Did you guys use accented letters? I think that's the cause. It only happened to me one time. I sent the same msg six times and it kept doing that. Finally I changed the accented "e" to a regular "e" and it sent just fine.

I second this, I'm having the same proble too,and I have a HTC Incredible, I even get the sme problem when sending text messages oversees. After reading all the problems with different carriers, networks and phones I think this is a bug in the messaging app in Android when encoding the message. Well I guess I will have to send messages punctuationless.

 

[Droid2Droid]

How to repeat the problem.

Okay so I actually made account to post this because no one can seem to figure this out. Well here's somethings that'll help.

1. Using Handcent Does NOT fix the problem.
2. THE PROBLEM IS COMPLETELY REPEATABLE AND CAUSED BY THE TAB KEY

So to get this problem to occur all you have to do is type up a message on the physical keyboard and include a tab. Its the button on the top left with the ~ on it. It will probably just look a normal space when you insert it which is why its so hard to catch. If you copy and paste one of the broken messages and send it again, you'll get the same result. ANY MESSAGE THAT HAS A TAB CHARACTER IN IT WILL NOT SEND CORRECTLY There's something wonky with the character, I've called motorola on this problem and informed them of it.

I think whats basically happening is that people are accidentally hitting the tab key and not realizing it because it can look almost exactly like a space, sometimes smaller. I've tried every other character and nothing else causes problems.

So I tested this on two up to date stock Droid 2's and got the same results, and then called Motorola. They know. So just be REALLY careful not to insert a tab in any text messages.