[EI22][GINGERBREAD] Gingerbread " Bug Thread "

[ej909]

So i figured out the battery life on my phone....with wifi my batter lasted about 3 times longer and the phone runs nice and cool. on 3g my battery lasts about the same that it always did and it is running warm..4g coverage in Minnesota is a joke so i have not had the ability to check that out yet

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk

 

[uscpsycho]

Glad to see I'm not the only on in GB hell.

Just read through all 17 pages of this thread. Is there anyone out there who doesn't have MAJOR problems of some sort? I don't understand how Sprint could possibly roll this update out and screw so many people's phones up in one fell swoop...

The first problem I have is how long my phone takes to start up. We're talking several minutes where my phone is essentially unusable. It starts with an internal memory scan which is ridiculously slow and then a very slow scan of the SD card. Is this normal? Is there any way to fix this?

But my biggest problem is GPS. I had serious problems in holiday traffic in an unfamiliar area today thanks to GPS going to hell. At first the GPS locks. Then I try navigating with the stock Navigation app/Telenav/Waze and all are problematic. They will either completely freeze the phone or they say "searching for GPS" and use the mobile network to find my location. While this is going on the GPS icon shows that I have a lock. And while it's going on if I try turning the GPS off the GPS setting shows that it is off but I still have the lock icon. That is impossible. At this point I have to remove the battery and restart to unfreeze the phone or get the GPS working again.

I did an OTA update. From the sounds of it doing a factory reset and updating to GB is unlikely to solve the GPS problem, but there is a fix for rooted phones. Is that correct? I've never rooted before but this may push me over the edge.

If you root GB and remove stock apps, some of them will show up at the bottom of My Apps as "Not Installed".

Media Hub, NASCAR, Football and TeleNav are there on mine. I tried installing Media Hub, it won't launch and quits with an FC twice. Then I uninstalled it but it's still there in My Apps. Sprint must really want those to stay on the phone.

Removing updates on Market and letting it re-update cleared up My Apps not showing installed apps.

The Clear Data, Clear Cache and Clear Defaults buttons for Market are always greyed out.

My phone has never been rooted; all of these stock apps are installed but I still have them listed as "not installed": TeleNav GPS Navigator, Sprint football, NASCAR, Media Hub, Google Books.

What's going on here?

Try copying the contents of your sdcard over to your computer then format your sdcard then move the contents back and see how that works. You may have some corruption on your sdcard.

This won't cause issues with apps installed on the card? What's the proper way to do this? Just copy everything straight from the card's root to a folder on my computer, format the card and then copy everything right back to the root? No apps/links will be broken?

You shouldn't take peoples pictures without their permission anyway...

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk

It has nothing to do with getting permission and everything to do with being disruptive. If you want to take a picture in a museum, a conference, presentation, even a wedding and want to take a picture you don't want your camera making shutter sounds with every shot you take.

This is ridiculous anyway, there are tons of very small digital cameras and AFAIK you can turn the shutter sound off on all of them. Why impose a shutter sound only on cellphone cameras?

When I plug my phone into the charger, the red led light does not come on anymore.

Other bugs. Random freezing, have to do battery pulls to unfreeze.

As mentioned above, While on a call, I can no longer pull down the notification bar. I have to go to my homescreen and then i can pull it down.

Phone seems to lag on everything I do. From loading apps, opening the gallery, dialing phone numbers etc.

I have all these issues as well. In addition, the light would flash blue when I had a notification and that doesn't happen anymore so there is no visual indication that I need to check for messages, etc. EDIT: The blue light does come on when the battery is fully charged but I couldn't care less about that.

So I'm curious, are there ANY improvements in GB? It seems to have broken lots of things without fixing anything.

 

[Dronak]

It starts with an internal memory scan which is ridiculously slow and then a very slow scan of the SD card. Is this normal? Is there any way to fix this?

The scan time seems to vary, but it probably shouldn't take a really long time. Maybe if it's scanning the card for the first time or rebuilding a cache or something, it might take longer than normal. But after that, I'd expect it to be faster. I'm not sure there's a fix for this, but maybe others know.

At this point I have to remove the battery and restart to unfreeze the phone or get the GPS working again.... From the sounds of it doing a factory reset and updating to GB is unlikely to solve the GPS problem, but there is a fix for rooted phones. Is that correct?

Yeah, the GPS seems to be a semi-persistent issue on the Epic. I don't know the details, but a factory reset might not solve the problem if it's something inherent to the hardware or the ROM. As you know, there is a GPS fix available (GPS FIX for Gingerbread leak - xda-developers), but you've got to get a custom recovery installed on your phone in order to apply it. You don't actually have to fully root, just getting the custom recovery would be enough to flash the GPS fix, but if you're going that far, you might as well root (it's just flashing another zip file).

Fortunately, the rooting process was pretty quick and easy. I used the instructions in this forum (see http://forums.androidcentral.com/ep...95-rooting-ei22-gingerbread-instructions.html). Naturally I can't guarantee that you'll have the same experience I did, but this was my first time modding my phone, and it worked well (thanks to Paul627g for the nice instructions). I applied the GPS fix, and getting locks seems better. Not sure about how it works for extended periods of time though (I don't use it much).

My phone has never been rooted; all of these stock apps are installed but I still have them listed as "not installed": TeleNav GPS Navigator, Sprint football, NASCAR, Media Hub, Google Books.

Maybe others have more info on this; I'm not sure what's going on.

Just copy everything straight from the card's root to a folder on my computer, format the card and then copy everything right back to the root? No apps/links will be broken?

You might want to get confirmation, but yes, I think that's it. I've done this before, but don't remember how or if it affected apps installed on the card. I would think that as long as everything gets put back, the phone should recognize the apps just like before the reformat.

Why impose a shutter sound only on cellphone cameras?

I don't know exactly what's going on with the Epic camera. In Froyo they removed the geotagging toggle setting. In Gingerbread, they gave that back, but took away the silent shutter sound. Someone's making these decisions for some reason. FWIW, if you get a custom recovery on your phone, you can flash a fix for this, too (see Turn off shutter sound on camera 2.3.5? - xda-developers).

there is no visual indication that I need to check for messages, etc.

AFAIK, my LED has been working as expected. With Froyo, it didn't always do what I expected though, so I installed NoLED (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.led.notify) to help. It works pretty well, so you might want to give that a try as a work-around.

So I'm curious, are there ANY improvements in GB? It seems to have broken lots of things without fixing anything.

Well, I used to have massive problems with the phone not recognizing apps installed on my SD card every time I reboot the phone. I often had to reboot and/or pull the battery multiple times to get them all recognized, and it could take 30 minutes to fix. Now, it works fine.

Also, my phone used to lock up sometimes if I tried to update an app that was installed on the SD card. I had to move it to the phone before updating to solve the problem. Now, I don't have to do that. I can update the app wherever it's installed without problems.

Battery life, I don't know. Some days it seems a bit better, some days it doesn't. It's hard to say if there was any clear improvement there.

Oh, the checkerboarding problem with the stock web browser seems to be mostly gone, too. I think I've seen it happen a little bit on zooming in/out, but not as much as before in Froyo.

Anyway, I hope this is of some help to you.

 

[cerobles1]

Well, not to make fun of all of you that are having issues with your Gingerbread, but I'm running ACS ICS v5.1 and I have had absolutely no issues what so ever. GPS works and doesn't lock up (I used it for 30 min or so) WIFI seems faster, my 3G definitely feels faster, and the camera shutter sound is gone. So for all of you complaining that EI22 sucks and you much rather go back to EC05 I'd say give a custom ROM a try, and see the difference compared to stock. Many features that the stock build doesn't have you can find them in a custom ROM. None of the issues that people are reporting in this thread I have on my phone. And yes, my phone is a refurbished that I got last year

 

[Skunkape60]

While I will have to agree with cerobles that the ACS ICS is great, the Legendary ERA EI22 R1 is also a great one if you like a more stock look. I cant decide between the two and keep going back and fourth. While I never had any complaints with stock gb (my daughter still runs the stock), I am really happy with my decision to root and load roms. I have a feeling that a few people here have hardware issues and not gb issues. Some of the issues I've seen posted I had on my first epic with eclair. I finally ended up replacing my phone and all the issues went away.

While I don't see many huge changes between froyo and gb, I think it was a worthwhile update.

Now with the official gb is out, the sky's the limit for our dev's and I'm glad to of made the leap into the rooting community.

Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk

 

[ericp74#CB]

I have 2 Epics and both are experiencing different things. For mine the phone runs a lot smoother & battery life is greatly approved. For my daughter hers is freezing & battery life is worse.

BUGs that i found so far that i havent seen listed: She notice her pictures are not mirroring her photos from the front facing camera anymore. Also I can't figure out why but both our phones emit some type of high pitch whistle & a restart is the only way to fix.

 

[strudel#AC]

Yes I used to do the same... Especially back in the early day of Eclair I would get a GPS lock then update to Froyo, GPS lock, then root and install custom ROM, GPS lock... Always worked good..

I apologize for bringing your response back from the dead here but your response gave me an idea and I am curious what your thoughts on it are...

I used Odin to flash EC05 from DK28 and then manually updated to Gingerbread while in my basement where getting a GPS lock is basically impossible. Predictably, my GPS is flaky where it either works great or I have to pull the battery to get GPS to work since rebooting is not possible in Gingerbreadt.

Would getting a GPS lock and then re-applying the Gingerbread update be beneficial or do you think I need to do a factory reset and/or flash a custom rom with a GPS fix to take care of my GPS issues?

 

[Dronak]

She notice her pictures are not mirroring her photos from the front facing camera anymore.

I had that issue before in Froyo. I rarely use the front facing camera, but one time when I did, I noticed that the picture looked mirrored (e.g., text was backwards). I thought it was a little odd, but just flipped it to the proper orientation with an image program on my computer. I haven't tried the front facing camera in Gingerbread yet, so I don't know if I'll still have that issue.

 

[kgilbertsen]

Would getting a GPS lock and then re-applying the Gingerbread update be beneficial or do you think I need to do a factory reset and/or flash a custom rom with a GPS fix to take care of my GPS issues?

I'd give that a try first, nothing to lose but the time it takes to get it done.

 

[uscpsycho]

Yeah, the GPS seems to be a semi-persistent issue on the Epic. I don't know the details, but a factory reset might not solve the problem if it's something inherent to the hardware or the ROM. As you know, there is a GPS fix available (GPS FIX for Gingerbread leak - xda-developers), but you've got to get a custom recovery installed on your phone in order to apply it. You don't actually have to fully root, just getting the custom recovery would be enough to flash the GPS fix, but if you're going that far, you might as well root (it's just flashing another zip file).

I've avoided rooting my phone so that when OTA updates are available I don't have to flash flash my phone back and lose all my data to get the update. If I install a custom recovery, can I still get OTA updates without flashing back to stock?

You might want to get confirmation, but yes, I think that's it. I've done this before, but don't remember how or if it affected apps installed on the card. I would think that as long as everything gets put back, the phone should recognize the apps just like before the reformat.

Can anyone confirm that this will work? Are there any hidden files or anything else that might not get copied to the new card and cause problems?

 

[Dronak]

I've never heard of a custom recovery.

Me either, really, until I started looking more seriously at how to root my phone. If you've seen the instructions on how to manually apply an update.zip file to go from Froyo to Gingerbread, say, you may remember the VolDn-Camera-Power key combo that you have to press before you can select an option to apply the update.zip file. Well, that key press brings you into the phone's stock recovery. It's possible to replace that stock recovery with something else, like ClockworkMod (CWM), which generally provides more options and features. That's my understanding, anyway, because I'm new to this sort of thing, too.

If I do the custom recovery, can I still get OTA updates without resetting?

That I don't know. I think that rooting generally affects the OTA pushes, but I don't know if just putting in a custom recovery will. It might, since you'd be modifying the phone a bit, but I don't know for sure. Maybe someone else can help here.

And I agree with you -- no root = easy OTA pushes. However, it is possible to return back to a stock OS and then pick up the OTA that way (not that I've done it, but I've read about it). People also always seem to have some way to update even if you're rooted. So you shouldn't be terribly stuck. And for me right now, I'm not really worried about anymore OTA updates, because I don't expect us to get ICS for our original Epics. And even if it does come out, it'll probably be almost another year with Samsung's track record (9-10 months to get us Froyo, 11 months to get us Gingerbread), by which time I should be eligible for a phone upgrade and moving to another device. If it comes out much before that by some miracle, I'll probably use info here or on other web boards to figure out how to update from root directly, or to figure out how to go back to stock, update, then root afterwards. The community seems pretty good about helping, so I'm not terribly worried about it.

Are there any hidden files or anything else that might not get copied to the new card and cause problems?

Oh, I suppose there could be .blah files which you might not see if you're hiding extensions or something on your phone or computer. There should be a way to turn that off, so you see everything, including files that might otherwise be hidden. If you're on Windows, check in Explorer for the Folder Options and see what's there. I think you can find the hide/unhide options there. That should help, but maybe others can provide more specific information.

I hope this helps.

 

[uscpsycho]

That I don't know. I think that rooting generally affects the OTA pushes, but I don't know if just putting in a custom recovery will. It might, since you'd be modifying the phone a bit, but I don't know for sure. Maybe someone else can help here.

Can someone please answer this?

 

[Skunkape60]

If you are rooted you have a custom recovery.

In the days of eclair you could be rooted and still receive updates as long as you still had all of sprints bloatware still installed and you were not on a custom rom.

Samsung and sprint patched that hole in gb. while people may still get the update while rooted if they try to install it, it fails.

I have been a long time holdout and never rooted as I felt it was better to stay stock to receive the ota.

first off... I seriously doubt the epic will see another OTA. Even if it did, I would image within a week so the dev. community will have a custom/better one out based on the ota. So really who cares about the ota.

2nd the only time I've lost any data or programs was the original time I rooted. I have tried 4 different roms and have flashed between those same roms st least a dozen times (couldn't decide which I liked best) and have yet to lose any data or programs that couldn't be recovered with the backup programs that are available to you when you are rooted.

I was like the rest of the stay unrooted and stock folks out there. But once I got over my 1st bad experience with odin and tried again, I understand how silly I was. It has been a great experience and wish I would have taken the leap a long time ago.

 

[rando991]

Custom recoveries (like Clockwork Mod Purple, etc) are what you replace the stock recovery with (it's kind of like booting into DOS or maybe BIOS on your computer, normally you never use this until you are rooted and want to flash certain ROMs or fixed Kernels (Like the GPS fix or the Keyboard key skip fix or the rotation lag fix, etc). Rooting your phone gives you power over your phone you don't have otherwise. With root you can flash a different ROM or you can stay on the stock ROM but do things like control Roaming, freeze apps you want to keep but prevent autostarting, remove stock Sprint or Samsung install apps that you can't remove otherwise. I root to fix all the above and maximize my battery life. People talk about voiding your warranty, but the Samsung warranty only lasts 1 year, not the whole 2 years of your service contract. Plus, there's always a way to restore the stock thru the computer (program called Odin) and it's similar to using quick restore discs when you want to restore your computer to its original state.

 

[daehttub]

Info from the Sprint Community Forums:
1) Anybody have a Sprint Store reflash your GB? Did it work? Some people are saying the OTA downloads might have been corrupted.
2) Sprint Stores are rolling back phones to Froyo. You just have to ignore the OTA update message. The lack of GPS is bothering me to the point where I might do this.

New Observations & a Netflix Bug:
1) Netflix isn't working after GB and it seems to be an issue with other phones.
2) I have noticed that my battery life lasts longer when the phone is turned off. It will actually stay at 100% for a while. However, battery life when the phone is turned on and being seems just as bad as it was before.
3) The only good thing from this GB mess is that I found out about NOLED for the Galaxy S. It's cool to have the photos of the people that contact you show up on the phone as a notice. Functionality is much better than the stock LED indicator light (that's no longer working properly).

 

[Auntie_]

froyo did have the local Sprint store re flash GB. At the time, they weren't able to flash back to Froyo. The only complaint so far is that my phone will not allow sd to mount to any computer. GPS seems to work fine.

 

[rando991]

Info from the Sprint Community Forums:
1) Anybody have a Sprint Store reflash your GB? Did it work? Some people are saying the OTA downloads might have been corrupted.
2) Sprint Stores are rolling back phones to Froyo. You just have to ignore the OTA update message. The lack of GPS is bothering me to the point where I might do this.

New Observations & a Netflix Bug:
1) Netflix isn't working after GB and it seems to be an issue with other phones.
2) I have noticed that my battery life lasts longer when the phone is turned off. It will actually stay at 100% for a while. However, battery life when the phone is turned on and being seems just as bad as it was before.
3) The only good thing from this GB mess is that I found out about NOLED for the Galaxy S. It's cool to have the photos of the people that contact you show up on the phone as a notice. Functionality is much better than the stock LED indicator light (that's no longer working properly).

If you can flash back to froyo, you know how to root. If you root, you can flash the GPS_fix.zip and voila! You go from GB's 4 of 10 satellites to 10 of 10!

 

[rando991]

froyo did have the local Sprint store re flash GB. At the time, they weren't able to flash back to Froyo. The only complaint so far is that my phone will not allow sd to mount to any computer. GPS seems to work fine.

GPS isn't completely broke, it just won't lock onto anymore than 4 satellites even though it can see 10. 4 is probably enough for most people using car navigation...heck only 3 satellites are used for triangulation/position, the 4th is needed to provide the timing solution (taking the fastest signal of the other 3). But anyway, if you root your phone there is a GPS_Fix.zip you can flash that will get you a quicker lock and you will be able to get all 10 (whatever is in view). You will need an app like GPS Status to see exactly how many satellites are in view and locked. If you don't care about this and GPS is working sufficiently for your needs, don't worry too much about it.

 

[ShaLea]

has anyone had the problem w/the Vibrate vs. Silent setting? I keep my vibrate setting to "always," but sometimes when i put the phone n my pocket (screen is locked), then I check it hours later & the phone has went to "Silent," and the "Vibrate" setting has changed to "Never."

Please help. How do I fix this?

 

[boocephus]

The gps issue is a problem for me. I have seen it lose lock after 15 minutes and it can't regain it. Which sucks because within 15 minutes of my house I know where the heck I'm going, right? Biggest seling point right now to root. Everything else is fine.

So, most rooters talk about all the geewhizbang cool stuff they can do. I just want to fix the gps. Will my phone be just as it is now in appearance/functionality or does rooting require a new ROM? I geek for a living and don't have much patience for screwing around with this stuff on my own time.