DO NOT UPGRADE THE HTC CHACHA TO VERSION 2.3.5!!!!!!!
I did this last night over the air. The phone has never been rooted or modded – it was bought without a contract so isn’t tied to any phone company. It was using the HTC software that came with the phone when purchased.
First problem after the upgrade was that it demanded a SIM PIN when there was none set on the phone. What happened? I locked the SIM and had to get the PUK.
After accepting the PUK the phone started up normally. I attempted to set a new SIM PIN. I was asked for the old SIM PIN. And locked my phone after trying unsuccessfully 3 times again.
(I think I know what I did wrong – when you enter your PUK you also enter the new PIN you want on the phone – but the initial enter PIN/enter PUK screen isn’t correctly dimensioned for the HTC ChaCha small display: there are no instructions – just a text box and the “next” or “ok” button – so it is impossible to know when the phone wants a PUK and when it wants a PIN – I just kept typing in the PUK over and over until it let me into the phone – again, shocking software testing issue when even the initial screens are unclear).
The WORST BUG is that every time I press a keyboard number or press the green button to make a call I get a window saying:
Sorry! The process android.process.acore has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again. Force close
The same error comes up if I try and start the “Phone” app.
If the phone is in standby and I wake it up to the password screen the “Emergency call” button does not respond. So you cannot make emergency calls using this software update either.
A phone that can’t make phone calls? I tried restarting the phone. And locked my SIM again (because I have no SIM PIN but the phone demands one irrespective of the fact none has been configured). I entered the PUK again. The phone still crashes every time I try and make a call!
This is as close to bricking a phone as is possible using an authorised software update.
Setting SIM Pin on CyanogenMod
- press the emergency call button
- enter **05*<PUK Code>*<enter a new pin>*<confirm the new pin>#
e.g. **05*12345678*1234*1234#
That set up the PIN and I was able to put my newly PIN-set SIM into my ChaCha and use the new PIN to get into the phone. However I still get a crash every time I attempt to dial a number.
Factory Reset
So my phone was as good as a brick. I had no choice but to factory reset it.
I turned the phone off. I held down the “volume down” key then held down the “power up” key until it went into boot mode – selected “clear user data” by using the volume up/down to navigate and the power button to select. Then the phone rebooted.
After going through the pain of adding all my accounts again – guess what: the phone still crashes when attempting to dial a number or make a call!
Here is the important information from the error report that the phone attempts to send to HTC:
package name: com.android.htcdialer
package version: 200176211
package version name: 2.0.2120152869.176211
process name: android.process.acore
system app: true
device: chacha
Build ID: GRJ90
model: HTC ChaCha A810e
SDK version: 10
release: 2.3.5
incremental version: 189894.2
brand: htc_europe
exception class name: android.content.res.Resources$NotFoundException
source class: android.content.res.Resources
source method: loadDrawable
line number: 1699
error: java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{com.android.htcdialer/com.android.htcdialer.Dialer}: android.view.InflateException: Binary XML file line #10: Error inflating class <unknown>
Phone is now officially a brick. Even after a factory reset!
Work Around
This post has proved very popular – getting, typically 4-5 views daily, clearly a lot of you are suffering like me.
You can install a new dialer from the Marketplace – when you press the call (green) button the phone will give you a choice of which dialer application to use. Most appear to cost money or require Internet access – I found one that didn’t need either – but it only works in portrait mode – it was called “exDialer”.
Update 2012-02-20: I rooted and installed CyanogenMod onto my phone. Now it has a working dialer! I’ve documented the steps I went through in this post.
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