I think I know what the problem is:
THE PROBLEM:
I am on my second 8X and both have the problems described above in this forum. Basically, the phone goes to sleep, so it looks dead...screen blank without any LEDs on. Unfortunately it will never come out of this mode. It appears to be dead, but often if someone else calls the phone it rings instead of going straight to voicemail as expected. Thinking it is powered down, one puts it on a charger, but that does not appear to work. But it will eventually. If left on the charger for a random amount of time, it will revive and show that it has like 1% or 2% power. It will then charge up and return to normal usage. How long it has to be on the charger depends. My first phone I left it on for days (I had given up and went back to my old phone and was going to return the 8X), and after 5-6 days it came back alive! My current one will come back in hours instead of days.
THE SUSPECTED CAUSE:
The phone goes into sleep mode and a program or the O/S crashes by getting into an infinite loop or possibly an internal hardware interrupt continuously firing. In this loop, the CPU usage must be at or near 100%. This makes it unresponsive and appear dead. Depending on the crash/loop, the cell transmitter may still be working and is independently still connected to the cell network (so we appear to still be online to those that call us). So we plug the phone up thinking that it needs charged, but it doesn't. I assume that when it is connected to a charger the battery must be charging, but since the phone is looped into 100% CPU usage, it is using power slightly faster than the charger is charging the battery. So depending on how much charge is in the phone before the crash, the phone continues in this mode for a random amount of time until the phone battery actually reaches depletion (again because the charger cannot keep the battery charged faster than the loop is using energy). Depending on the starting battery power or the actually CPU usage (89% versus 95% versus 100% for example), the phone finally drain and shuts down and depowers. Since it is doing this already connected to the charger, it then powers back up when it has minimum power (shouldn't take long...maybe immediately at this point). At this point the phone will boot up normally and be back to normal.
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS OR FIXES:
If the battery could be removed, removing the battery would work (I did this with my Android problems)--but I like the thinness of the 8X...like it better than any phone I have every had (I have had all the other platforms). So one way might be to NOT put the phone o a charger and let the phone drain faster so that it shuts down. The problem here is that you will never know when it actually shuts down, so one would have to plug it up periodically and see if the LED comes on--remember though if it is fully drained, it may have to actually charge for a bit before it reached minimum charge (maybe not though).
Another thought would be to try to figure out why it may be in this crashed loop to start with. Others and myself have noticed it happens a lot when the phones are in our pockets. There is a feature that rings the phone louder when it thinks it is in our pocket. Maybe turn this feature off as maybe the method used to do this has a bug or something. Maybe a similar feature might be doing this. If it is not the O/S or the phone software itself, maybe it is a background task that is going crazy, so looking at these programs might be the problem. There are some problems with the WP O/S I believe so it could be in the O?S itself (hope not).
If anyway can test these assumptions with me and post the results that would be cool. Unfortunately the only way to know if turning off features or background tasks work is by waiting a long time and not seeing the problem...argh! ...but got to start somewhere since HTC isn't fixing this anytime soon.
Thanks all! I do not know if this is the problem or not, but it does fit the evidence quite well.
--GAD
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