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Help Phone Shutting off randomly?

Andrewdroid said:
I think every workaround people are posting seems to be just that ... a workaround.
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Not to beat the proverbial dead horse, but there are no workarounds - only a solution.

As I've written before, even one random shutdown is one too many, assuming you're a responsible individual who wants to be there for anyone counting on him.

P.S. If you purchased the device from an AT&T corporate store and there are more than just one in your area, go to another store in the event that their batch wasn't afflicted by the bad run. If you purchased it from another retailer, the same applies - visit one of their other locations. Just trying to tilt the odds in your favor.
 
I’ve had my SAMSUNG Galaxy S Vibrant phone since Sept 18 and I do love it…when it’s not in a coma! I put the phone in its carry case and when I took it out it was “off”. Press the ON/OFF button…nothing. Finally I figured out that if I held the ON button down for 10 seconds the phone would “restart”. It does this constantly. It never charges properly because it keeps going coma during the charge and nothing happens…it’s like it’s crashing. I loaded the latest firmware…still does it. I wiped the phone…still does it.

So, what’s wrong and when can we expect a patch or fix! I can’t have a phone that crashes on me. I am missing important calls, text and I can’t babysit it while it charges! Mine seems not to crash if I keep waking it up constantly, but, put it on the bedside table to charge…no way, it’ll never happen! Within 20 minutes it has crashed into a coma.

Husband is taking it back to Best Buy in Vancouver today, (so far it hasn't shut off on him all day!) but I see that many people are on their 2nd or 3rd phone and it’s still happening. I’m wondering why this hasn’t gone public as it is a really serious flaw in the phone!

I've read lots of people who are thinking it's one app or another, a screen saver, GPS and so on. My phone has done this out of the box, so I really don't think it's an app. The only thing we all seem to have in common is that it happens when the signal strenght is low. At home I only get 1 or 2 bars and it "seems" to happen at home 99% of the time.

It seems to happen if I lose the signal altogether too. I have not noticed it happen when I am in town, or where there is stronger reception.

TL in BC
 
On my phone, it seems to be related to the battery level. If the battery level is more than ~95%, the phone will shut down when it goes to sleep. Once the level drops below that, it doesn't shut down by itself anymore. This pattern is consistent across multiple tests.

I also tried charging it to ~80% and taking it off the charger. No shutdowns occurred. I am also able to reproduce this consistently.

That says to me it's either a bad battery, or a bad power regulating circuit. My brother's phone doesn't have the issue, so I'm going to see if I can reproduce the issue with his battery in my phone.
 
Update: it seems to occasionally do the shutdown as low as 90% battery or so, but I still have not gotten it to do it at 80% or lower.

I'll post the results of the battery swap test after I have a chance to play with the other battery.
 
Thanks again Jack for helping talk some sense into all of us having problems. Just exchange it or go through warranty I think... this is definitely a hardware issue, aka bad batch.

It's difficult when you get something like this that you really, really like and then all of a sudden it has a problem... and shutting off randomly is a BIG problem. Not acceptable. Most of the posters here, like me, they love this phone. Luckily it's a phone and not an abusive girlfriend/boyfriend. This is a piece of hardware that's most likely under warranty or exchangeable for a new one that hopefully does not have this issue. Don't settle for a lemon.

Please if you are having this problem, you need to look through the tutorials on doing various backups... especially a Nandroid backup before you return your phone. Then after your Nandroid backup, backup the entire internal SD card on your PC.

And then at the exact moment you return the bad one, do a factory reset (total data wipe) and make sure to keep your Sim Card and External SD card!!! But definitely look up backup information!!!:(
 
Anyway that's my take on this situation.. hardware problem so try to backup your phone. Unfortunately backing up seems to involve a lot of rooting and stuff like that. It's very annoying! I hope someone makes a good backup tutorial.

Oh PS, if you do go the route of exchanging to a new phone, download Samsung Galaxy Unlocker as soon as you get the new phone. It'll give you the sim unlock code for free, but it only retrieves the code on the earlier JF6 firmware (Settings, About Phone, last 3 digits of baseband). Once unlocked though, the code works on later firmware updates I can confirm that. Unlocking the sim will boost the phone's resale value and let you pop in foreign sim cards whilst travelling!! Very good.

Donate to that group so they work on the unlock app for the new firmwares!
 
I just wanted to add to this thread.

My friend bought a Captivate two days ago. It worked fine the first night, then the second day it would randomly shut itself off. He ended up returning it to ATT yesterday, and they gave him a new phone. So far so good.

The guy at the store claimed he "had never heard of any issues with the Captivate". Ugh.
 
I talked to my AT&T guy and he said he'd had similar probs with his own captivate but didn't think was anything to worry about. He asked around the store and nobody had heard about, but he searched online and found the problems.

He said no worries, bring it in and he'll swap it out.

Which leads to the next logical progression... backing up your stuff.

Anything free that's any good?
 
Joined just to post on this thread. I took my Captivate back this morning for a new one. Mine had been shutting off randomly...at first, I thought it was me. But I realized it would just shut off for no apparent reason. Got on Google this morning and read tons of threads on different forums about the Captivate shutting off. I bought this back in Sept and was afraid my thirty days were up. Looked at the receipt and had two days left. Hallelujah!!! Took that baby in and got another.

A little background. I had been up for a renewal for a while. I was using a palm centro and was wanting something better. I decided on a Blackberry Torch...in fact had my heart set on one, then I started doing the research. Lots of bad reviews. I thought, every phone gets bad reviews of some kind or other anymore. Went to get the torch anyway. ( I am hard headed) and the salesperson said he had sold 5 and 3 were returned. I ended up leaving the store with nothing. I had considered the Captivate but thought I wasn't tech savvy enough to handle it. Went and did my research on that one and decided to give it a try anyway. I bought it and LOVED it....that is until it started randomly turning off. Can't have a phone that doesn't work. If my kids need to get in touch with me... I need a phone that is dependable enough to work.

Anyhoo...hopefully this will fix the prob., I am not suffering under any illusions that it will though...just keeping my fingers crossed.
 
Im having a problem with my phone continuing to shut off. Especially when I am asleep. I dont understand why......I may have to return it. At first, I thought it was the app I was downloading but thts not the issue. I uninstalled and still had the issue.
 
After a few days of relative reliability (the gps still s.. - well, you know), the keystrokes started freezing, and then last night an input box froze, cursor stopped blinking, and then it just went night-night. :( I could not get it to turn back on without battery pull. If that's what it takes to keep this phone going, I've already got a paid-for Blackberry I can have that kind of experience with.

So I'm making my fourth trip to the AT&T store, and hope they swap out the thing for another one, and see if I just got a lemon. They blew me off yesterday. I'm loving the phone more, and am getting the gps to wheeze along - learning how to use the navagation even when it can't find a gps lock. I just hope it works to some extent with Maps when I go to Bend, OR, in February. If I still have it by then, that is.

Advanced Task Killer rocks, BTW, for getting the battery to last longer. Still not up to what I'm used to with other phones, but I'm hearing that's the nature of the smartphone GUI beast these days.
 
newdroidfan said:
Im having a problem with my phone continuing to shut off. Especially when I am asleep. I dont understand why......I may have to return it. At first, I thought it was the app I was downloading but thts not the issue. I uninstalled and still had the issue.
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First, welcome.

Is there a question embedded in your post? If you're wondering what to do, wonder no more. Exchange it. For additional information, search for keywords random / shutdown for zillions of related posts on this and the xda forum.

There are two things you shouldn't do...

1. Attempt to find a cause for the random shutdowns (it's currently unknown).
2. Hold on to your current device wondering if it'll automagically fix itself. It won't.
 
Swapped out my phone on Friday, and the new one is working well. No shut-downs, no dropped calls, and the GPS works as well as my Blackberry did, so for the most part I'm a happy camper. However...

The camera does become unresponsive on rare occasion (and I've used it a lot), so I took it back in, and of course it behaved perfectly for the AT&T folks. When it happens, I can get the phone to shut off using the side button, either with holding it down, or with the "Phone options" menu, so it's not a complete lock-up of the phone. Next time it happens, if I'm at home, I'm going to see if it will take a call in that state. I'm thinking it's a software issue, not really an electronic component thing, but I'm a nurse, not an engineer. But even with that, this newer handset is far and away better-behaving than the previous one.

No question here, just wanted to post my experience. Swapping out the phone seemed to work, so not every Captivate is a lemon. I'm loving mine more every day!
 
Bleh my phone just started doing random shutdowns as well. However I did flash it to cognition 2.2 but I'm guessing that isn't the real problem? I'll try flashing back to stock and see if it still happens
Can I still get an exchange even though I got this phone through amazon?
 
packrat42 said:
Update: it seems to occasionally do the shutdown as low as 90% battery or so, but I still have not gotten it to do it at 80% or lower.

I'll post the results of the battery swap test after I have a chance to play with the other battery.
Click to expand...

It's definitely not the battery. Tested with a known good battery and the shutdowns still happen. Looks like I'll be taking it in for a replacement this weekend.
 
mudwoman - oh yea i forgot to mention that I am outside the 30 day window of amazon to make an exchange. Should I just contact Samsung?
 
skywkrvnv said:
Many of you think its a software issue. IT IS NOT!!!!! IT IS A DEFECTIVE PRODUCTION RUN!

Exchange your phone. Period. That is the only solution.

I exchanged mine and it has not shut down! AT ALL!

Back away from your techie egos and exchange the phone! The bottom tier people at AT&T and Samsung (service folks) are unaware of the problem..why?....management doesn't want THEM telling people the phone is defective.

Strongly suggest everyone get replacement phone AS SOON AS RANDOM SHUT DOWN FIRST happens. It is obvious they had a bad production run at the beginning.
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Not too sure about that, I uninstalled setCPU and have been running fine for weeks, also I purchased my phone in ireland so AT&T prob won't help me much :-)

Just wondering was the same ROM installed on both phones?
 
...I know it's been posted before that folks don't think it's the SD Card, but I was having the shutdown issue until I removed the external SD Card. I saw how often the phone reads / writes to the storage both internal and external and thought "maybe it's the SD card".

I only had, Marketplace, K9 and Zedge on the card. I'm running all three on the phone w/o the card and have not had one shutdown since removing the card. Maybe it's coincidence, I had done some of the troubleshooting in this thread with no luck.

Cheers.
 
Well I finally got all the apps and stuff put back on my new captivate after swapping it out in the 30 day window. Now my second one is shutting down twice as much as the first one.

I'm up to 5 times per day (a new personal record). Everytime it happens I make a little note in the memo app, just to keep track.

I'm heading back for my third phone sometime this week.

(edit: 2 seconds after writing this.... It makes 6 in one day.. I'm on fire!)
 
My phone has shut off randomly 4 times in the past 2 months. I will be calling Samsung to get a new Captivate. My 30 days are up and I purchased my from a AT&T authorized seller so I have to go through Samsung. Will I get a refurbished phone? I don't mind if it's refurbished as long as it looks new. I babied mine and it still looks new so I'd be disappointed if I receive a new phone and it has scratches and such on it. Any experiences getting a new phone through Samsung?
 
Mine started to shut down unexpectedly this weekend. It was the day after I turned it off and did a full battery charge over night. Now it is spontaneously shutting down 2 -3 times a day when I am scrolling fast, surfing the net or doing several things at once.
Any one have a clue??
I have not done a hard reset yet.

Jim
 
Random shutdowns redux.

If you've confirmed that a random shutdown was, in fact, a random shutdown and that you didn't effect the turn-off yourself, you can do one of the following:

1. Repeat "why me?"
2. Beat your head against the wall.
3. Wait 'til your 30 day trial period is up so that you can then complain about getting a refurb.
4. Howl at the moon.
5. Try to blame it on a yet-to-be identified misbehaving app. (even more fun if your phone is stock.)
6. Try another battery.
7. Research the hundreds of postings here and on other forums that haven't yet determined a way to keep the phone and eliminate the shutdowns.
8. Listen to Ave Maria backwards, at which point you'll hear the soft, haunting words...

"Exchange the phone, my child."

Ladies and gentlemen. There is NO OTHER SOLUTION.

Don't argue with Ave Maria. It's a beautiful song - and now with even more meaning.
 
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