Force Closing, Battery Life and Contacts Problems

[Shamfajam]

So I have had my Epic since the day it came out. At first the only complaint I had was that my battery life was horrible. After a little over a month I got the battery replaced and all was well... for a while. In the last month I have noticed my phone has been getting slower by the day at reacting after selected anything. Then I kept getting the force to close notices even when I wasn't using my phone; which caused my alarm to not go off in the morning 2 separate times. Then final straw was last night when all of my contacts (except for the facebook ones) just up and disappeared! The phone never turned off, froze or restarted. Sprint techs kept saying I had to just sign into my google account, which did absolutely nothing. Anyone else out there feeling my pain or have any ideas on how to fix or keep from happening again???

 

[Smitty_82]

Did the FC notification say what was being closed?

 

[Shamfajam]

yes, it was a lot of regular system things like the alarm or the messenger. Never an app or anything like that.

 

[ragnarokx]

I hate to give such a generic answer, but a factory reset sounds like it's your best bet. Make sure to back up anything you need as it will erase anything not on your SD card.

 

[Shamfajam]

Well being that every contact i had on my phone has mysteriously disappeared I don't have much i need to back up anymore. The people at Sprint think it is a software problem and are going to send me a new phone. Now my question is if it is a software problem then what is a new phone going to really do? Won't it have the same software as the one i have now?

 

[ragnarokx]

If it's a software problem, then doing a factory reset would accomplish the same thing as getting a new phone with factory settings.

Also a tip for next time - make sure you link your contacts to your GMail account, that way they are always backed up in the cloud.

 

[Shamfajam]

That's what everyone keeps saying but when i try restore my contacts back from gmail like i was told it doesn't work. Maybe it will work after a factory reset...anything is worth a try thanks

 

[ragnarokx]

I think you may be misunderstanding. When you create a contact, you have the option of linking it to your GMail account. If you do not do this when you create the contact, it will never sync to GMail. That's why I was saying next time you enter your contacts into your phone, link them to GMail so they will be backed up.

 

[jrz5024]

Anybody know any way to back up contacts to Google after the fact?

 

[rando991]

Yes, when you create a contact an option comes up to save either to "phone" or "gmail." You should select "Gmail." Next make sure "sync" is turned on and in a little while, your online gmail account will get the contacts. If you have to factory reset, then all you should have to do is turn on sync to pull your contacts from the web. An alternative is to go into contacts, open menu/more/import-export. This will save the contacts to a .vcd file then make sure you move it to your sd card (it will be named 0001.vcd probably). I no longer like THIS option, because if you import that file it will write over your phone contacts file and put contacts there, but you will lose your preset phone groups file. I use that sometimes when I save certain contacts to the phone in addition to saving them to gmail, so that I can edit groups from my phone.

 

[rando991]

To clarify my post above, save your contacts to gmail always. IF you want to edit contact GROUPS, you create duplicate contacts and save THOSE to "phone" to have them available for groups. If you import that vcd file and overwrite your groups, you can get them back by doing a factory reset.

 

[Skunkape60]

I think he was asking how to push his contents already saved to the phone memory to google, without re typing everything. I would like to know that as well...