I have a 6700 that I bought about 2 weeks ago. A couple of hours ago, I noticed that I couldn't turn it off (it was ignoring the power button), nor could I turn off the backlight (holding it in did nothing). I could, however, launch and kill apps, make phone calls, and surf the net. I tried to soft-reset (stylus in hole), but it did nothing (short press, longer press, not even if held for ~15 seconds). Eventually, I left the phone alone for a while and the display shut off automatically. Now I can't turn it on at all, and even hard-reset (holding both "-" buttons and pressing reset with the stylus) won't work.

I took it to the Sprint store on Van Ness in San Francisco (I'm at JavaOne), and they weren't able to revive it.

Before I throw in the towel and get it replaced, is there anything left I can try to wake it back up before blowing $50 on TEP (I bought the phone used on eBay, so it presumably has no warranty) and losing the $25 peel & stick shield I put on it a week ago? I can't believe the phone would literally break, as in "honest to god physical component failure", because it hasn't been dropped or otherwise abused... and like I said, the last time I saw it working, it looked like it was just ignoring the power and reset buttons. By all accounts, it looks like it just had a bad software crash that somehow requires a physical power cycling and reset of everything back to some safe default values.

For the record, it's never been reflashed (though I might try it tonight when I get back to my hotel), and the last thing I installed on it was XPDF viewer. At various times over the past few days it's complained about being low on system memory while running PIE, but going to the control panel memory applet usually showed ~12mb free for both program and storage. I was running some programs off flash, but the flash card was never removed.

Have you tried taking the storage card out and then powering it on? You can also try taking the battery out and leaving it out overnight to see if that will do an effective hard reset. It definitely sounds like a hardware issue but it's worth a try.

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If it's a hardware issue, what exactly could have physically broken? It hasn't been dropped, subjected to extreme G-forces, frozen, left in the sun, gotten wet, or anything like that... and I've been into electronics long enough to know that it's pretty rare for something with few moving parts to physically break (with the possible exception of old electrolytic capacitors, and not-so-old electrolytic capacitors manufactured ~1999-2001).

Or, by "broken" do you mean that HTC made a design mistake where the CPU and hardware might theoretically be working just fine, but the software has crashed and corrupted flash/ram/eeprom in a way that can't be recovered from without opening it up and reprogramming it with something like a JTAG (or custom hardware that exists only at HTC on their assembly line & needs to be accessed via testpoints on the board)?

hello,
you honestly dont know what the phone has been thru before you purchased it. i can guarantee that it has no warranty. that phone could have been dropped, had water splashed on it, G forces, etc.. the whole nine yards.. without really knowing the life it had before you got it its hard to impossible to diagnose the issue. sprint doesnt have anyone in the store smart enuff to figure out what it is so you are better off going the lockline route.

but yeah , in the meantime, i would just leave the battery out overnight... if you have the original charger just pop it in there and let it charge while the phone is left with no battery. if you dont have the charger, first make sure the yellow light comes on to signify its charging.. once you can confirm that, then just leave the battery out and let it sit. i know it may be difficult to not have a mobile phone especially if your traveling, but this will help.

if you cant get it to hard reset, it may be a battery issue. once you start a hard reset, the phone will wake up for that. if its not even waking up, then its possible your battery and/or battery contacts may be the problem. if you have another battery that would be ideal...

Just found this site and am going through it to justify I made the right decision. In December I bought a 6700 and in less than a week had the same problem you experienced. Was exchanged as a DOA and this last week the same thing. In the couple of months I had the 2nd unit it seemed to work better software wise than the 1st but still a disappointment, especially using media player and having the music files on the miniSD. I'd always have to click through to the storage card as it would not read as the default library. With the newest unit, it now does. Little things just seem to work better than the 2nd unit, but too early to tell point by point. I was never able to figure out how to get a movie clip to work and it worked on the 1st try with this new unit. This last unit is some 10,000 units higher than the 2nd unit is the s/n reflects produced units.

The 2nd unit nor the 1st I could not get to work with Bluetooh and hopefully with this 1 it will. I use Time and Chaos and Companionlink in lieu of Outlook as it is the cornerstone for managing my business and on the 2nd unit had issues with field mapping from time to time and "unresolved items" from time to time but, so far not problem with the 3rd.

I was ready to throw the towel in and go back to a Palm based unit. I have used a Palm organizer and never had an issue or freeze. I liked the keyboard on the 6700 better than the thumb boards and since I had used a Toshiba Libretto 110 for some 6 years until this past year, I was used to a smaller keyboard and have gotten pretty good using the 6700's keyboard for documents. This plus a good salesperson convinced me to go for it originally. Only after did I remember my 2nd laptop uses Linux as well as my home desktop.

Anyone know of a Linux substitute for Activesync?

Well, for better or worse, the theory that completely de-powering it might fix it seems to have worked. After my trip, I reactivated my old i500, took out the 6700's battery, and put it on a shelf. A few weeks later, I decided to give it another try. I charged the battery using the dock and power adapter, put it back in the 6700, and somehow got the phone to boot back up again. Last night, I reactivated the phone, and it seems to be working.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty gun-shy at the moment, because I still have no idea what specifically might have caused the problem I had back in SF. I'm also a bit disturbed by the seeming randomness of how I turned it back on.

Pressing the top power button did nothing. Pressing and briefly holding the top power button did nothing. Briefly pressing the red phone/power button at the lower right did nothing. Nor did pressing and holding it for a couple of seconds. Nor pressing and holding it for about 10 seconds. I remember spending about 2 minutes trying various press-gestures for the top and red power buttons before it finally powered up from a top button press. I'm suspecting that the key to turning the phone back on might have been a long, blind red press that silently re-energized the phone, followed by a top button press that turned on the display.

I'm also still afraid to do anything besides take and make phone calls, and even then I'm still holding my breath, halfway expecting the problem to return at any moment. I'm leaning heavily towards a hard reset and starting over, simply because if there's something lurking on the system that made it crash in SF, it's probably still there, and I still have no idea what it is.

Here are some of the programs I haven't eliminated as possible crash-causes:

PocketXpdf -- high on the list. The main suspect, in fact. I installed the app the morning everything went to hell.

Camera -- another major suspect, mainly because the phone's crash happened right after I took some pictures. It's kind of a blur, but I almost remember accidentally sliding out the keyboard while doing something with the camera.

Magic Button -- only on the list due to vague suspicion that it might be capable of intercepting presses to the power button and/or reset vector, and might have inadvertently caused the phone to end up in a state from which it couldn't escape.

Pocket Stella/CE -- dubious, but once again, it's an app that intercepts hardkeys and thus on the official 'suspect' list.

I'm also considering a reflash to 3.3 or 3.5, if only because it would absolutely re-virginize the rest of the 6700's registry and flash...

By the way, is the problem I had (unable to turn off, then later unable to turn on) the one that's referred to as 'BSOD' here (I assume that in a 6700 context, it would mean 'black screen of death?)