A Samsung Vitality (Cricket) R720 is not working properly.
History and problems:
- It was rooted by my son (not sure what he did, a teenager).
- It had some minor physical damages on the case.
- works fine for several months, but now it reboots every 13 minutes until the battery is totally used up.
- Phone is stuck in Air Plane mode, unchecking "air plane" won't do any thing.
- Check phone status will throw " "Sorry! The process com.android.phone has stopped unexpectedly... Force Close. "
- try using the Camera App, it shows a black screen, then if trying to go other screen by pressing back key, it pops up "sorry! Activity camera (in application camera) is not responding."
- trying to call, pops up a window "to place a call, first turn off Airplane mode."
- most of the times, shut off does not work either.
- Wifi works fine except for the repeated rebooting.
What I have done:
I have removed all the user data by going to settings -->Privacy --> factory data reset -->reset phone, it seems nothing changed.
Possible causes:
I am thinking of 2 possibilities here, one is hardware failure, and another is that my kid messedup the system, after all he did rooting and an administrator privilege could do dangerous things on the system.
I am not familiar with phones in general, but I am quite comfortable with computers. I have many questions on how to proceed from here. I would like to get help from your gurus.
Questions:
1. Assuming it is a corrupted system, is it possible to flash a good rom and get the phone in working condition?
2. Does this procedure contain a ROM? or does it just revert back to the stock interface?
3. Is this procedure the right thing I should do? If not, what else I should do?
4. Do I need to do any backup before flashing? in case if things get worse, then I maybe able to get back to the current status at least.
If any of your gurus can guide me in my endeavor, that will be really helpful.
Warranty
If it is a hardware issue alone, we might seek warranty. It was bought in March, and the warranty should still be good.
We have not activated the phone on the Cricket network yet, mainly it was configured with Googlevoice and used as a wifi device.