I bought a Samsung Captivate on Kijijii. I did test it before I bought it, and it picked up 5 bars, and more importantly, held the 5 bars.
Took it home, and ordered the unlock code, which took a few days to get through. In the meantime I upgraded the phone from 2.2 to 2.3.3. Everything seemed to be fine. Got the unlock code, put in my SIM card, put in the unlock code....everything worked perfectly. It didn't pick up a signal though at first, which is a problem with my carrier(I think). They make you go in and manually search and then register. Which I did. Well, for the longest time it wouldn't find the carrier. I have pretty crappy service, so I went outside, still nothing.....went to work and stood under a cell repeater which gives 5 strong bars to any other phone, and my Captivate would show my carrier, I would register, and it would get 1 bar, and then within 10 seconds, it would lose signal again. All while I was standing right beside the cell repeater.
Not only that, but for some reason it would turn on flight mode, and then when I would try to disable it, it would sit there for about 20 min doing nothing.
I went back to 2.2.....still did the same thing. Went to 2.3.3 again, still the same problem. Tried 3 different modems for my specific model phone, 1 of them would find the network instantly, register within 10 seconds, and then drop signal again and go into enabling flight mode, and being a general pain in the *** to turn off. I would actually have to reboot the phone to be able to search for networks again.
The phone came from Rogers, so I put in my brothers Rogers SIM card, and it instantly found the network, registered and gave me 2 bars without me having to do anything. Except then it began dropping signal, getting signal back...dropping it, getting it back. It is winter here right now, and we do have spotty service, but I have Samsung Fascinate that holds at least 1 bar consistently. Not sure if the antenna strength is better. From what I understand they are more or less the same.
I swapped out my SIM card into a different unlocked phone and got service instantly, and then put another different SIM card into the Captivate, and it had the same problem.
I'm pretty much out of options. I'll try tomorrow to see if I can hold a Rogers signal better, which it hopefully can because I'm thinking of selling it.
But I'm inclined to believe that it might be a software problem. Problem is I have no idea what to do in order to fix it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
EDIT: I'm not sure if this is a MTS problem. I had no problems holding a signal last night with different phones, but today it seems to becoming up. Not sure what is going on.
Played around with it a bit more. On 2.3.3 with the KH3 modem installed, it will find the network, then try to connect for 10 min, where it will then say 'unable to connect, please try later.'
Then after clicking again, it will say 'unable to connect, select automatic registration' and then sit there for another 5 min. When it finally comes back, I will click on 'select automatically' and it will say after a couple min, 'registered on network', but won't get signal.
All of this I do with 5 bars service. Or in an area with 5 bars service.
Also, the flight mode constantly comes on, and disables 'mobile networks'....so I can't access it. And its a bit weird that it would do that, since any other android phone that I've had, when I lost service, it would constantly try to connect, not go into flight mode and refuse to come out.
Would it help to install a custom ROM on it? I'm going to try going back to 2.2 and test some more stuff. Problem is the small amount of time I spent with 2.2 last night, the phone would crash everytime I tried searching for networks.
After playing around with it even more, I'm convinced that it says 'error while searching for networks' because the phone constantly jumps back into flight mode.
Even when it does get a signal and registers, the phone jumps back into flight mode within a couple seconds, and bang the signal is gone.
Maybe I have the wrong modem on there? Just a strange problem. I'll try installing CM7.1 and see if it fixes anything. The phone should absolutely not be constantly going into flight mode even when it does lose signal.
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