Hot Stuff.

Back towards the mid/latter part of February I upgraded my Nokia Lumia 800 to the (then flagship) Lumia 920, complete with Windows Phone 8. I was very happy with this device and it worked well for several weeks. I’m not going to do a review of the phone hardware or Windows Phone 8 itself as there are plenty of those out there, but here are a very few notable points:

1. I don’t mind the weight of the device. Having upgraded from the smaller Lumia 800, itself no lightweight, the extra weight seemed a fair trade-off for a larger (excellent) screen. It also didn’t feel any heavier than my previous Desire HD, but that had been out of use for almost a year by this point. I suspect that if I had been coming from a similarly sized, but lighter phone, I would have noticed more.
2. The OS takes much longer to boot up than Windows Phone 7.5, which was one of the things I liked most in my older device, especially after the Desire HD got itself into such a state that it would take over seven minutes between turning on to being ready!
3. The new synchronisation software and capabilities were a step back in the new OS. Forget about the Zune name, the actual Zune software used to synchronise Windows Phone 7.x was magnificent and easily better than iTunes. The Desktop and “Modern” versions of the sync software for Windows Phone 8 are embarrassing, even now almost a year after release. Still, at least the phone finally mounted as a normal drive.
4. The OS itself seemed a little buggier. With Windows Phone 7.5 I wouldn’t need to restart for weeks on end, Windows Phone 8 sees me reboot far more frequently; however, this may be explained by the reason I’m writing this post…

My main issue with the phone first transpired when using tethering. On my train journey home I go through several dead-spots where the connection is lost. After a couple of months I noticed the phone would not automatically re-connect to the data connection whist hotspot functionality was enabled. I put this down to a bug in the software, since switching the tethering off or putting the phone into flight mode for a moment (disabling wireless signals) sorted the problem.

Then voice calls would start to drop, eventually refusing to connect at all without “restarting” the radio.

Recently I noticed the phone would fail to connect to 3G signals, and if it was reporting a connection, even a full connection, text messages were not arriving and calls were not being connected. Similarly, data connections for phone apps refused to connect despite the supposed presence of a signal too.

Not good, but things were about to get a little worse.

Quite often, when the phone was apparently working, it would get warm in use, even when doing light browsing. Not always though. And in areas I knew were well covered with a strong signal.

Then in the last week the phone has been getting very hot, to the point where on Monday night it became too hot to hold and I had to turn it off to cool down.

I initially suspected the SIM may need replacing, but yesterday I finally called T-Mobile/EE and walked them through my experience. I was pleasantly surprised when the lady in their help team told me that it sounded like a hardware fault on the phone (normally they make you jump through hoops resetting first) and the overheating issue sounded “dangerous” and advised me to take it into a store to be looked at be the engineers.

So now I need to blank off the phone and probably switch to the old Lumia 800 for a while whilst this is investigated. Hopefully the staff in the store will be as helpful as the advice I was given on the phone and it will get sorted quickly, but I am worried I may be palmed off and told to jump through a bunch of needless hoops.

Hardware faults are going to happen, I understand that and I’m not angry in the slightest. It’s just a shame that I’ve been so worried about the inconvenience of getting this sorted that I’ve delayed doing anything about it for so long.

I’ll let you know how I get on, watch this space.

Oh, and wish me luck!