I have 2 Galaxy s4 phones; 1 personal and 1 supplied by my employer.
Yesterday on a business trip, after charging both phones to 100%, after a little over 3 hours, I had 0% battery.
During most of the trip, I was unable to send email, and would randomly not be able to send simple texts.
I have not been able to edit any documents for the past month, and that ongoing issue just frustrated me that much more.
I tried to use the camera to take a short video, but the phone went in to "cool down" mode.
For most of the trip, I could not get 4g or 3g, but only something called 1-x (never saw that before.)
A co-worker, who also has a gs4, said he is having issues with his as well... That's when I realized it was probably nothing I was doing that was causing these issues.
So last night, I spent over an hour on the phone with Verizon; the first guy I spoke with said that all of the issues I reported are known issues, and that Verizon is sending a huge list of these and other issues to Samsung. That sort of goes along with the scores of comments posted here from people having the same issues.
He sent me to somebody called a "level 2" technician.
She said that in order to diagnose the issues, we would have to do a factory reset of the phones to see if the issues went away, because I have installed some third-party apps that are known to cause problems such as draining the battery rather than extending it.
I refused to let her reset my personal phone, but my work phone is fairly new and there was nothing on it I couldn't live without.
She also told me that I need to clean everything off my sd card, format it, and then put everything back on it; that would definitely fix the issue with being unable to edit documents stored on it.
After resetting the phone, she told me to install one third party app to see if the issues continued.
I installed an office suite that I used to use all the time but have been unable to use recently.
I am still not able to open or save documents, even though I reformatted the sd card. I also put in a new sd card this morning, just to be sure. No joy. something about permissions, but the built-in office programs seem to work ok (other than being very inadequate for my needs.)
This morning, I restored my work email, but all day have been unable to connect to my work wifi (something that was never an issue before.) I have kept them both plugged in constantly just to avoid having a dead battery if I am away from my desk for any length of time.
Since the 'clean off / format sd card' method is a proven fix to the problem about permissions, I reached out to the developer of officesuite, and explained the problem to them to see if they had a fix or workaround. They said it is a permission problem with the phone, and not a software problem.
Here is my problem... one office program works fine with the sd card, another one does not.
A trained technician from verizon has told me the fix for one of the problems I am having, but the software dev says the level 2 technician is wrong.
I see as many people posting comments that say "resetting the phone worked" as I do comments saying "resetting the phone did not work."
Do I believe the technician, who says it is a *proven* solution, or do I believe the developer who says the suggested solution has no impact on the issue?
I have evidence that proves the sd card can be written to, so I tend to think the developer is just trying to get out of refunding my purchase price.
I am really at my wit's end with these phones; being unable to use them at all when on a business trip is bad enough, suddenly not being able to use them for something as simple as editing a spreadsheet (when that functionality used to be there) is another strike. Suddenly losing the ability to connect to wifi is making it even more frustrating. My personal phone has had connection issues the past month with my home wifi, which I think may be the cause of the 4+GB data last month.
But not being able to find any concrete answers to these issues is enough to make me want to go back to my black rotary phone and say the hell with verizon and samsung. Since I have to keep them both plugged in to the wall to keep the batteries from dying, I might as well go back to a hard-wired phone anyway!
Is there any word on here from someone from verizon who can say definitively what needs to be done to fix these phones?
