Help Issues with Droid Eris

[Shumax]

Hello:

My girlfriend has a Droid Eris that is probably 4-5 months old, running on Verizon’s network. Lately, she's been battling sluggish performance and an odd issue with her texts.

The keyboard shows and she can type a message; however, the content that she has typed doesn't show up until she's ready to send the message. She also keeps getting an error message that says something like "application error."

Further, when she sends texts with photos, it will bounce back saying it wasn't sent. Sometimes the receiver ends up getting them, other times not.

She spoke with Verizon, at length, and they blamed the later concern on a connectivity issue with the towers in the area. She's done a *228 and nothing changed - I'm not certain that's even relevant to data, though. The former issue they thought was attributed to a thread strip she had maintained on the phone -- it was an ongoing text with about 3,000 entries. She erased it and things actually got worse.

Frustrated with the phone and Verizon, I'm hoping someone here might be able to help. I should tell you that she has not loaded any extra applications onto the phone except for one that she uses to maintain grocery/to-do lists. That's it. Everything else is as it was the day she bought it.

Thoughts?

 

[doogald]

I think that it's a pretty typical that having a large thread of text messages like that on the phone will really slow performance, and it's nearly impossible to delete messages when the database gets that large.

What is typically recommended is a factory reset and start again from scratch. I think that sounds like the best solution. I'll also suggest an app called Delete Old Messages: Delete old messages - Android app on AppBrain - which basically does what it says - it will, with a single click, delete old messages from the phone, to help with maintenance. You could run that every week to delete any messages older than a week. There is another app called SMS Backup+: SMS Backup + - Android app on AppBrain which will backup all received and sent text messages (and MMS messages, actually) to an email label on gmail so that you can still reference copies of old messages, if that is something that you still want to do.

I'm not sure why MMS messages would fail - perhaps a factory reset will help with that as well?

See this thread: http://androidforums.com/eris-tips-tricks/80233-factory-data-reset-option.html (the first two posts) for the method to factory reset.

 

[Shumax]

Ok. We got the chance to try the back-up and it errored out. It said something about an "IO error." Any thoughts relative to this portion of it?

What is she do to as it relates to backing up her contacts?

Thanks again for your help!

 

[doogald]

For contacts, as long as they are all Google contacts and are syncing with her Google account, they will all come back after the factory reset. If they are not Google contacts, but are "phone contacts" instead, you can use an app called UiA Backup Contacts to back them up to .csv files and then import those to Google for next time (it's a really good idea, for this reason, for your contacts to be Google contacts in Android.)

UiA - Backup Contacts - Android app on AppBrain

As for SMS Backup+, if you tap on Advanced Settings at the bottom, you can set the maximum number of items to back up from "all" to something like 200 and see if that helps. How many messages does she have stored on the phone?

 

[Shumax]

This is working much better - thanks again! How do I move the data back over to the handheld? I.E., the contacts, calendar and select SMS's?

Thanks again!

 

[doogald]

Contacts and calendars are synchronized with Google, so once you set up your Google account they will all come back. SMS Backup+ has a restore feature. It can restore all of your messages, or you can tell it to restore the last 100 or 200, etc.