You'll be unsurprised to hear that my HTC Sensation experience has
been more of the same since my last blog post.
One thing to note is that in the last 6 months I've found I can no longer use the camera flash on my handset because when it fires it always kills my handset with a sudden turn off. I can't be sure but I would suspect the sudden power drain is the cause, and that would point to a badly designed power and battery system.
My phone has continued to have occasional sudden turn offs. One morning at work in December it went off after some continuous use due to our building having a power cut at the time. A few days later the phone turned off twice in my pocket while out Christmas shopping. The gaps appeared in the battery usage graph as before. The first gap was small, and the second turn off made the gap bigger with a different resultant level after the gap. I ran the battery down to 5% and charged up fully overnight.
The next day the phone turned off again in my pocket. When I booted it up it turned off in my hand as it finished booting. I had already suspected that the battery was again suffering small but sufficient movement to be the cause of these turn offs, despite my earlier (incredibly advanced!) fix of adding a business card between the unibody and the battery. This time I added in some blu-tac at the top of the battery (to hold it against the handset's power contacts), and on the back (to hold it firm against the unibody).
I've not had any problems in the month since then so it looks like battery movement was again the cause of the random switch offs. This is pretty pathetic!! A £500 handset that has such terrible mechanical design that the only way to keep it working is by fixing it with blu-tac!!
Some may speculate that the cause of this problem is having a removable battery. A properly designed handset should support a removable battery without this problem - my other 7 mobiles with removable batteries don't have this problem. It just happens that HTC don't put much effort into correctly designing their handsets.
Another bug I've noticed is that the ring and notification tones can get changed at random. More than once I've found an incoming call has triggered the calendar reminder jingle instead of my normal ring tone. It goes without saying that HTC haven't provided any updates for some time now. I think it is certain that the handset will not get Android 4.1 - it is currently on Android 4.0.3.
This is the big frustration. HTC only support their handsets for about a year after launch, but users are often locked into a 2 year contract with their mobile network. The only way to get updates after the manufacturer stops supporting the handset is by rooting it and installing a custom ROM like Cyanogen which is not only beyond the abilities of many users, but would also have consequences for the handset's warranty. Most users just don't want that kind of hassle.
HTC - Epic FAIL!
Unfortunately this is an issue that only Google can fix in Android - allowing updates to the OS without requiring the handset manufacturer to re-integrate their customisations (like HTC Sense) so that handsets can be updated for as long as they're technically capable of running the underlying Android OS version. I don't see that happening any time soon unfortunately - and this will only exacerbate the version fragmentation that plagues Android.
