Help Please help!!

[Flablitz]

This is my wife's phone and we bought it as a upgrade to a better phone from her Motorola XPRT about a year ago. It was purchased new from radio shack for 50$. In my opinion I overpaid a lot. Since we have had this phone it has had major problems lag, poor signal, crashes, freeze ups ect....... I know the phone isn't that great whatsoever, but what I'm asking is - there any thing, programs, scripts or just tips to help this phone at least act normal? On another wonder. It is a 3G phone. Is the speeds I'm getting for 3G in NE FL that bad, I mean it can take 5 min plus to download 10mb. Even the XPRT was like that. I know any info is a shot in the dark because of age and popularity of this phone, I can't afford another one at the time and maybe no time soon we are just going through a really tough time. I need to try and do anything to get it running half ass right cause if my 11yr old school calls, and it freezes, or won't answer for 10min even after battery pulls, it's embarrassing and even nerve-wracking. Not trying to sob story or nothing, just hoping this may let someone know my situation and maybe be inclined to help, when it may be passed in some other case and that's just honestly and truthfully my dilemma. Thanks a bunch in advance.

 

[AMOCO]

You could try a factory reset and/or root it too and remove the bloatware.
No way to speed the 3g up,That I know of.

 

[summondice]

I can relate 100%!
I am truly a noob at this stuff, but what helped me at least get mine semi-functional were the following:
1 - I accepted pretty quickly that even on a WiFi network, for reasons I don't yet understand... It's simply not worth my time to try to use this phone for web browsing and only minimally to check Facebook. On FB I can check things ok right up until an image is involved... And we all know that FB is not renowned for the thought-provoking text-based anything people post I check the notifications page and actual status updates and that's just about it.

2 - Along that same line, I found FB's messaging app to be an enormous resource hog annnnd that, somehow, it seemed to be eating text messages (both sent and received). I'm the only person I know who has had this issue, but it started when I installed this particular app and stopped when I uninstalled it. That's as far as I had the time and energy to research it.

3 - I have a few (free) apps that I use very frequently which help keep mine vaguely functional. I have found that using these as soon as I notice the phone taking its sweet time to do frakking anything at all, instead of waiting for it to freeze and having to remove the battery, has drastically helped it reboot (no idea on the how or why... Just consistently observed):

A. Battery Defender: for the most part I have just let this app do it's thing without mucking with its default settings much. It not only improved battery life, but helps keep resource use down.

B. Advanced Task manager: This was the first app I installed to really start getting a handle on the issues you're having. I watched which apps seemed to give me the most trouble, pinned this to my game page to keep from throwing the blasted phone against a wall waiting for it to just moved one screen left or right, and used it with a caution to the wind kind of attitude. It helped enough that I could run Spotify, Bluetooth, and a timer app at the same time.

C. Cache Cleaner - I quickly found that whatever I installed on this phone needed to be as simple as possible... No Candy Crush like graphics. I looked for apps with minimal permissions, that were small, and the graphics looked like 8 bit games. Doing this helped my sanity, though it does take extra time and awareness - a 3 star rating in the app store is often going to be a flag for you to give it a go because of how people tend to rate things (if it ain't got that swing, you see...).

This little program isn't the best at what it does, but it's pretty fast and it will save your wife a ton of time as long as she uses it, like, constantly. It doesn't have bells and whistles, and your wife will notice that sometimes she'll lost a saved custom dictionary entry, but I found the trade-off well worth it. That's the biggest issue I've had with this app (the dictionary thing).

D. Greenify - I use Cache Cleaner and Greenify "together". The second my Hydro seems to be thinking it's nap time I pop open the cache cleaner and remove what it finds, and then I open up Greenify. It's full functionality I have not been able to make use of on this phone, but I've added nearly everything to it's hibernate function and it has been excellent at keeping most apps hibernating, which saves sooooooo much frustration. I have noticed that for larger programs, the first time I run it after hibernating it, it will usually crash. If she just comes to expect this, closes the program, and starts it again, she'll find herself in a happier place. Not the happiest... But happier

I don't know that the order of using these apps actually matters, but it makes sense to me to do them in this order since it seems to help Greenify be able move a little faster.

E. Avast! Antivirus - I mentioned you'll be spending a lot more time looking at instead of passing by 3 star apps... Having an anti-virus you trust will give you and your wife some peace of mind when trying a program that seems to rate well by people who aren't after bells and whistles, or which isn't necessarily in English...I trust Avast! And have generally used it on my laptops and PCs because it's smaller in the resources department than most others.

F. Disable the default Google apps - unless she uses them. Reader, music... Can't think of the others but I think there are like 5 that aren't huge, but together running unnecessarily in the background make the phone run just a little slower. Likewise, do this with any other app that you can't uninstall and which Greenify can't hibernate for you.

G. Restart very regularly - at least daily. If she has been using it a lot and knows that it's just about the time of day when it just stops functioning, she should stop, clean cache, Greenify, and reboot. At least a few times a week, remove the battery AFTER the phone has powered off (it helps tremendously... I'm not tech-savvy enough to understand why, but the difference between just removing the battery with the phone still on versus powered off is noticeable).

H. Awareness and willingness to learn - This is simply not a phone that is going to allow her to do everything she may want to without regard to how it impacts her experience as a user, but, she should find that if she is selective about which "big" apps she wants, she can generally use them ok if everything else is hibernating, she cleans the cache often, and strongly considers removing data on some apps regularly.

I. All of that said... I still despise this phone but am in the same spot you are. I don't encounter it as often, but my phone will still fail at its primary purpose. Often. In those times, however, using the above apps and information, I find the reboot time to be much much better than it used to be (when walking somewhere would take less time to find something out than using this device!).

Good luck!

 

[Flablitz]

I appreciate the effort and time you put in this post to help me out. I just checked the post today and since I posted originally I have actually added a couple of those apps. I know this phone is a major fail, also it has made me prejudice against kyrocera. I prob won't own another one of their products. At the end of the day this phone is damn near not usable bout the box muchless after time. I wish I knew how to make ROMs because I would have to make a more lightweight ROM for this phone just because I know there is prob many many more hydro users, silent, but annoyed with this phone. Thanks again for your reply.

 

[bostonbb]

I too dispise the hydo. Have rooted it using framaroot 1.9, chainfire s.u, busy box free. In that order.then link2sd app. Youll want a good file explorer..i use E2...You are aware you should make a backup right? I've moved on to the hydro edge which I've managed to screw up ... Btw if anyone has a copy of I'd appreciate...accidentally cleaned mine out of my toolbox. Am currently using the dreadful hyro...poor student syndrome.

 

[bostonbb]

A quick note...i forgot to mention when rooting i used the gandolf exploit. Also took a few tries for it to take root. Root checker used until rooted.