Update: HTC Desire HD turns itself off, hope for nice new phones

An update to my original post concerning random rebooting of the HTC Desire HD.

Even after an update was applied to the phone over the air, I found that it would regularly reboot itself even when I'd left it unattended.

The answer turned out to be that the SIM card was gradually loosening from its slot, which I think was the original root cause of the phone rebooting unexpectedly (I thought this was something to do with the Alarm Clock, but it seems that was more of a symptom than a cause).

I taped my SIM card down inside the phone so that it couldn't budge from its slot, and it has never rebooted itself again.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the phone is badly playing up these days. When I call other people it randomly puts them on hold and dials other people's numbers, and more often than not it will just terminate the call without warning.

So I think it's almost time to lay the ol' HTC Desire HD down to rest. It will be interesting to see what comes of the Apple, Nokia (not so much) and other phone launches. 

When they announce the iPhone 5 (seems like it will actually happen this time!), I hope that the new version of iOS includes proper 'Android-esque' widget functionality - for me this will make or break my decision to buy an iPhone. 

So come on Apple, make your OS properly content-centric - not just a bunch of brightly coloured icons.

HTC Desire HD turns itself off: Solved!

I recently bought an HTC Desire HD to replace my iPhone 3GS.
It's an excellent phone in many ways, but has one or two flaws. When on a business trip I set my alarm for the next morning and left it switched on and plugged into the charger. I had never used the Alarm Clock app before.

Since I had been caught out recently by the iOS alarm clock bug on January 1 and 2, I didn't entirely trust that the alarm would go off.

My mistrust was well placed, and it was lucky I set the bedside alarm too, because the phone alarm didn't go off. The phone's power had cut out.

When I turned it back on, much to my dismay the phone kept turning itself off at random every 20-30 minutes and for no apparent reason. I couldn't figure out what was going on and thought maybe it was something to do with a loose connection in the phone or the battery.

I was about to send the phone back under warranty, and thought I should really spend some time to see if I can find the answer before going to the trouble of being phoneless for a few days while it gets fixed.

So I eventually stumbled across the answer on AndroidForums (The link takes you to the main page because I found the post last night and since haven't been able to locate it).

1. Turn phone off and remove the battery, SIM, and memory card.
2. Leave the phone for a minute and put the memory card and battery back in (not the SIM).
3. Turn back on, allow to boot and then switch off again.
4. Take the battery out again, wait a moment and put back in with SIM too. Turn on.

Apparently this type of reboot clears out some files that a normal restart wont, and causes certain programs that are set to start (and that could be the cause of the issue) to be disabled.

I'm not sure if the Alarm Clock was the problem, but it seems a coincidence that this happened after the very first time I had set an alarm on the phone.

Anyway, I found that not only did this simple fix solve my issue and thus prevent me from having to send the phone back, but the Desire HD started working at lightning speed after this!

Result!