***FIXED*** HTC Thunderbolt Google NOT Syncing AND Weather Widget WRONG LOCATION PROBLEM

[DCM*T*BOLT]

hmmmmm, thats strange to me,,... Ive always felt that lots of punctuation actually helps with the correct intended meaning and emphasis of something you are trying to get across, otherwise,... being it's only black letters on a white screen, things can easily be misunderstood

and,... I still have trouble understanding why so many people seem to have such an issue with capital letters, aside from the improved emphasis, their easier to read,... I truly honestly sincerely can not understand why so many people almost seem to be offended by them, its just a font... what am I missing ???

note: all this was typed with a friendly tone ....

 

[EarlyMon]

It's customary on forums and pretty-well understood by convention that using all caps is the text equivalent of shouting - and shouting is done to underscore that you think the other person is an idiot.

This goes back to the pre-web days and is pretty much part of the lore that we used to call proper netiquette or, network etiquette.

That's a big part of what's offending people. You might consider using our italics tool instead of caps - that's more polite.

Also - I didn't come down on punctuation, I was asking about your abuse of it -

hmmmmm, thats strange to me,,... Ive always felt that lots of punctuation actually helps with the correct intended meaning and emphasis of something you are trying to get across, otherwise,... being it's only black letters on a white screen, things can easily be misunderstood

We don't allow anyone playing grammar or spelling nazi, and I won't make a big deal of it - but the string ",,..." doesn't help me at all with meaning or intentions - it makes me interrupt reading and try to reconstruct what you might have meant to say.

But on that part, you do as you think best.

But the caps part - no fooling, that's not good.

 

[DanDroid]

The time/weather widget getting all of out of whack is _known_ problem on HTC phones.

As near as any of us have been able to tell - it's because it ties to the highly crappy accuweather.com - and when accuweather loses its mind, your widget will.

I once went to accuweather when I having a widget problem, and tried to look up the city I was visiting - Rancho something in California (I travel a lot, don't recall) - anyway - accuweather came back and told me that I could choose a city in California or one in Venezuela by the same name. I chose the one in California - and it repeated the query in an endless loop. While that was happening, the widget insisted I was in Buenos Ares.

The next day, the accuweather.com on the web found the city in California correctly, and a few minutes after that the widget started working again.

I think they're not getting this bug fixed because the guys working on it really don't understand the issue or where to place blame.

This applies to all carriers, all HTC phones from time to time - no one model suffers it a lot, and no one model more so than others.

And just a friendly suggestion - punctuation is your friend, capitalized strings, and excessive ellipses and punctuation marks do not help with message emphasis at all, they simply making reading the message that much more difficult.

By the way, advising others to search is against our Zero Tolerance Policy, link in my sig.

Well I say let's start with HTC and the widget. Why not give end users a choice in picking which weather service to use? Beautiful Widgets has the option.

And.. I just checked, for BW we have a weather choice of Google, or Accuweather. I have Google selected, and all is well, reporting my city of "Eastlake". Went back in, changed it to Accuweather, refreshed and BAM back to showing "Ohio" only.

If BW can have the option for users to select a weather provider, then I think HTC can do the same thing.

 

[EarlyMon]

Well I say let's start with HTC and the widget. Why not give end users a choice in picking which weather service to use? Beautiful Widgets has the option.

And.. I just checked, for BW we have a weather choice of Google, or Accuweather. I have Google selected, and all is well, reporting my city of "Eastlake". Went back in, changed it to Accuweather, refreshed and BAM back to showing "Ohio" only.

If BW can have the option for users to select a weather provider, then I think HTC can do the same thing.

I couldn't agree more, and thanks for the quick and definitive verification.

Sad part is they can do the same thing - but haven't.

All I can suggest is adding your voice to those that have already raised this issue by sending an email to HTC explaining what you've explained here. I've not seen it proven out quite so clearly and succinctly (ace job, btw!) so maybe they'll get the message this time on how to fix it.

 

[makerofdrums]

3) No Android Facebook apps let you tag other people in pics... wtf? iPhone has done this for a long time. When you're taking mobile photos to send to FB, you want to tag those people in them, but you have to do it later from your computer, or log in via the web to do it.

Only solution I have: take all your photos and go to the gallery. From here, you can share them to FB HTC SENSE, which gives you the option of tagging folks.

 

[DCM*T*BOLT]

so... , just for giggles.... I decided what the heck, I'll do a factory reset one more time, couldn't hurt, especially after all settings I have been playing with....

,,, the verdict... NOPE ... no change, weather widget still don't give me proper town, and I also had to re-run gps fix for gps to find me accurately ......

kinda starting to think there is NO permanent user fix...and a software update is the only solution.......

 

[EarlyMon]

DCM*T*BOLT -

Yep - it seems the factory reset and/or removing and then re-doing the widget with different update-time settings and/or a battery pull can clear a tangled thing in memory if a bad accuweather.com transaction got stuck - but otherwise, it's out of your hands.

Oh - btw - web browse to accuweather.com and ensure it knows your city on your desk, then attempt same with your phone browser.

Sometimes that can clear it - so it's worth a shot.

I guess we can all hope they'll listen to DanDroid's solution and give everyone the update required on this one.

If it's any consolation - and I don't think this should be acceptable, I'm just saying what I know - it never seems to stay permanently broke for anyone. I think the longest I've heard of it being completely whacked is like 3 or 4 weeks for one guy in Detroit, another in the UK somewhere.

It takes a long time for programmers and software organizations (I've worked with both) to learn and then mature their thinking into getting that just because something passes a test and it works, that that's not the same thing as not failing.

DanDroid -

If you have time and inclination, please post here the email to HTC and any response they give, with my big thanks in advance.

 

[iawd1]

Someone should post a fix for the slow ass keyboard while using texts

 

[DanDroid]

Someone should post a fix for the slow ass keyboard while using texts

Is this a new issue? You may want to post a new topic. I don't use the stock keyboard, I'm using smartkeyboard pro, does a much better job.

 

[DCM*T*BOLT]

Thanks for the info, Accuweather on my laptop or phone will find my town when I put in the zip. didn't affect the weather widget though...

HOWEVER ...

yes I used caps on purpose .. haha... something very very interesting I just discovered ..

so, starting to give up on this widget, I just downloaded a free one called Fancy Widget, this is a somewhat similar clock/weather widget (though not as animated as the stock one) that instantly showed my correct town when I have it using gps , you can also manually put in you zip code an it also found my town that way as well. If I select 'my location' only it did NOT find me

But here is the BIZARRE part ... I opened up the Fancy Widget on a blank screen... had it up and running using the set location by gps .and it was working correctly...and then I hit my home button..and holy smokes.. my stock clock/weather widget was showing the correct town... I even refreshed it a few times and it held correctly ... .... that has never happened before... !!!!

.. however after about 5 min... ( I kept updating it to see if it would hold) ... It finally went back to just saying New York ... and then I went to the Fancy Widget and that was ALSO now showing NY ... what the heck... ... I then went back to gps fix..and it looked like I may have lost my signal again.. however, after getting my signal back, going outside, I was able to get Fancy Widget to find my correct town via gps ... however after a few min that also goes to just saying NY ... very strange...

The fact that the first thing that happened was it *corrected* the stock widget for about 5 min. and then goes haywire itself... makes me again lean towards thinking it is a stuck cache file or something...which is corrupting other gps apps as well. Im not done.. I'm gonna figure this out if it kills me... haha

The good news is,.. Fancy Widget seems to work fine if you just use your zip code, and it has much more customizable settings than the sock widget. Fancy Widget uses the Weather Channel. I think I already prefer it over the stock widget ... outside of the cool animations...

 

[rocky s.]

DanDroid:

Ditto on the thank you for that BW tip! The notorious htc weather widget thing has been a thorn in my side for both my dinc and now my t-bolt. I've had ongoing experience with incorrect cities being listed and the mysterious town in China making its appearance. (And, yes, my t-bolt gets nostalgic for China only when I'm home). This is strange stuff, but the fact that it's such a known issue has spared me needlessly switching out phones. Interestingly, I suspect if you spoke with htc or vz support, there's a good chance they would not have the kind of chat with you that confirms this as something known. Instead, they would have you do factory resets and maybe send you a refurb. replacement when that didn't work. Again, another reason a thread like this helps us prevent such mis-steps.

Well, on to beautiful widgets to see if that works for me. And, EarlyMon, you are quite the diplomat.

 

[rogue_slc_vzw_rep]

I don't know if its been mentioned but a good trouble shooting step would be to try another widget like beautiful widget or fancy widget and see if they get a different result.

And it was mentioned in the post right above mine.

Carry on

 

[EarlyMon]

DanDroid:

Ditto on the thank you for that BW tip! The notorious htc weather widget thing has been a thorn in my side for both my dinc and now my t-bolt. I've had ongoing experience with incorrect cities being listed and the mysterious town in China making its appearance. (And, yes, my t-bolt gets nostalgic for China only when I'm home). This is strange stuff, but the fact that it's such a known issue has spared me needlessly switching out phones. Interestingly, I suspect if you spoke with htc or vz support, there's a good chance they would not have the kind of chat with you that confirms this as something known. Instead, they would have you do factory resets and maybe send you a refurb. replacement when that didn't work. Again, another reason a thread like this helps us prevent such mis-steps.

Well, on to beautiful widgets to see if that works for me. And, EarlyMon, you are quite the diplomat.

Thanks.

FWIW - often when it screws up, we've been able to trace the math back to bizarre, but after-the-fact, kinda understandable (but not excusable) things - like same coordinates but with hemisphere-hopping, or a lat-long transposition - stuff like that.

And I think you're dead-on right - when people have a prejudice that something isn't _really_ broken, they'll tell customers to chase symptoms instead of causes!

 

[DCM*T*BOLT]

Well I have been playing with Fancy Widget (free version) for a few hours now, and it looks to me that the problem lies in the Google location service. With Fancy Widget you have full control over what service to use, rather than the stock widget forcing you to turn on Google Location Service.

If I set Fancy Widget to Google Location Svcs .. most of the time it will mock the wrong location as the stock widget, however if I set it to gps, it updates to the actual location I am at. Also, if I try to have both Google and GPS on, usually it will still show just 'New York', or a neighboring town. So it appears to me that the phone prioritizes Google Location Svcs which is sending an inaccurate signal,.. OR, the phone is just not interpreting the signal correctly. Many times my phone will just say 'Current Location' rather than showing an actual town name.

So my conclusion is that the problem lies between Google's Location Svc and the stock widget.

I have not tried Beautiful Widget, but Fancy Widget is free and seems to work accurately. It looks like the $1.99 version will give you the animations as well as some other additional features.

Strangely my stock widget seems to work fairly good when I'm anywhere but home.

 

[ProxisTech]

To DCM T Bolt...you are way to worked up over this weather thing dude. Take a chill pill and relax. They will fix it in an update at some point. You seem to expect perfection in a device. You say you've used them for 20 years...well I have been in it for 34 years and I have NEVER seen anything work right the first time. Thats the nature of technology. If you are going to use it then get used to it and stop complaining. My weather widget picks up the neighboring town too but that's because of of the GPS services in honing in on the tower there. I am close to the border, but you know what? I don't really care...the weather is close enough for me. So theres a bug in the widget. Then don't use it or use an alternative and move on. I started with a Palm Pilot in 1996! That thing was like carrying a block of wood around in your pocket. Since then, I've had just about every device you can imagine on every platform there is....and I can truly say this device is AMAZING. I love mine and have had NO problems with it. The battery life sucks a little but I can deal with that until the 1800 mAh batteries come out. Relax! be nice to your T-Bolt! Take it to bed with you!

 

[DCM*T*BOLT]

ProxisTech... with my friends/family, I'm the one they all call to fix there comps, and I'm usually successful... I just thought If I put some effort into it, I could solve this annoying little issue...I keep trying because it always seems like I 'almost got it licked' than bam.. nope 'that' didn't work either.., it's becoming a quest .... haha...

Your right, for the most part, outside of a few bugs, so-so speaker and battery life, it is a pretty powerful phone. I haven't put it down since I got it, and yes, including finding myself messing with it while in bed ... haha

I have had lots of phones myself over the years, and yes, some were less glitchy than others,.. but what primarily annoys me is, though the bells and whistles have gotten much better, the essentials have not,.. ie: battery life, durability, call quality, speaker, ... heck, I remember my motorola star tac ..., you could drop that thing off the roof, run over it with your truck, drop it in the toilette, let it dry out over night, and would still work great, loud speaker, and go 3-4 days without having to charge it ...etc ... just an example .. it just seems the basic essential features of the phones should be near perfect by now.... it seems every phone I have gotten over the years has cost me much more money but gotten progressively worse on battery life, speaker quality and more and more fragile ..... yes I know they are doing more and have bigger screens,.. so how bout,.. rather than coming out with a new latest and greatest phone every few months , that really isn't 'all' that much different from the last latest and greatest..... how bout these companies spend a few days improving battery efficiency... just a thought, and maybe figuring out how to improve the speakers.. ... I joke with people saying ya, the Thunderbolt is fast, it has to be, so you can hurry up and do what you need to do before the battery dies.... :}

anyways,... Ive pretty much exhausted my efforts on this freaking widget ... I tried to find the fix... ya gots to give me that.... haha

 

[DanDroid]

DCM*T*BOLT -

Yep - it seems the factory reset and/or removing and then re-doing the widget with different update-time settings and/or a battery pull can clear a tangled thing in memory if a bad accuweather.com transaction got stuck - but otherwise, it's out of your hands.

Oh - btw - web browse to accuweather.com and ensure it knows your city on your desk, then attempt same with your phone browser.

Sometimes that can clear it - so it's worth a shot.

I guess we can all hope they'll listen to DanDroid's solution and give everyone the update required on this one.

If it's any consolation - and I don't think this should be acceptable, I'm just saying what I know - it never seems to stay permanently broke for anyone. I think the longest I've heard of it being completely whacked is like 3 or 4 weeks for one guy in Detroit, another in the UK somewhere.

It takes a long time for programmers and software organizations (I've worked with both) to learn and then mature their thinking into getting that just because something passes a test and it works, that that's not the same thing as not failing.

DanDroid -

If you have time and inclination, please post here the email to HTC and any response they give, with my big thanks in advance.

So I gathered up all of my data / research / printscreens and fired off an email this morning to HTC Support. I just received a response, which is below.

****
from
HTC <na-no-reply@htc.com>

to
DanDroid

date
Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 4:53 PM

subject
Regarding your message (11USCW15ENA00####)

mailed-by
htc.com

hide details 4:53 PM (4 minutes ago)

Dear Daniel,

I will be happy to assist with your weather widget showing the state you live in rather than the city. We are aware the weather widget on your phone may show the incorrect location, and are working towards resolving it. While we work to identify the root cause (it is not the same core issue you have seen regarding any other device) you may want to briefly check with Verizon and ensure your device and the new LTE SIM card are properly provisioned.

If they are, please check our website for updates periodically and it is highly likely you will receive an update notification on your device once we have resolved the issue. Otherwise, it will begin to display the correct location once any server-side or network-side issues are corrected.

To send a reply to this message or let me know I have successfully answered your question log in to our ContactUs site using your email address and your ticket number 11USCW15ENA00####.
Sincerely,

Douglas
HTC

****
I'm really glad to hear this. I just hope they follow through. I plan to repsond to this by asking for a possible time frame for a fix, although I doubt they will release any specifics.

Stay tuned!

-DanDroid

 

[DCM*T*BOLT]

DanDroid,

Thanks, that's good info.

How do we know if our device and the new LTE SIM card are properly provisioned. ... ???

 

[DanDroid]

DanDroid,

Thanks, that's good info.

How do we know if our device and the new LTE SIM card are properly provisioned. ... ???

Assuming that he meant if we are in a 4G area and have coverage (and it works). Just like *228 to activate a new device. And yes, *228 doesn't work on the Thunderbolts, activation on these devices are a bit different.

 

[EarlyMon]

Translation - we don't really believe we have a problem, it must your phone wasn't set up properly.

 

[DanDroid]

Translation - we don't really believe we have a problem, it must your phone wasn't set up properly.

I hear ya!

Ya know, ever since I got my first smartphone way back in 2005, (PPC6700, ah the glory days) I've been a bit leary of smartphones. The main problem I see (and still do) as end users, who are we to go to for problems?

The Carrier?

HTC?

Google?

Back then it was the same and now 6 years later it's no different. They all want to point the finger at "the other guy" and ultimately we as the consumer, lose.

 

[EarlyMon]

Dan, great work! Sorry I didn't say so in my earlier outburst - I was just cranky.

Please follow up with them - if you manage to get a case number applied, I'll spread the word to other HTC owners hereabouts. Your work with BW has proven in simple terms what we've gathered logs on but were ineffectual with.

I'm really hoping you're the guy that finally kicked a hole in this logjam.

 

[DanDroid]

I added more info to the original ticket, below is their response:

****
from HTC <na-no-reply@htc.com>
to DanDroid
date Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 3:41 PM
subject Regarding your message (11USCW15ENA00####)
mailed-by htc.com
hide details 3:41 PM (39 minutes ago)
Dear Daniel,

Thank you for your reply. I have forwarded the results of your testing to the appropriate party and appreciate your thorough troubleshooting on this matter.

Sincerely,

Douglas

HTC

****

On a side note, my issue seems to have been resolved. Last night, off to bed and I plugged in my Bolt as I usually do. Today I woke up, unlocked the device, and now my location is perfect, back to the way it was before this mess started a week ago. Now, could this be coincidence? Perhaps. I did however provide HTC with the IMEI number, what they can do with that remains unclear to me.

Just to be sure, today I went out during my lunch hour (I work from home). My location changed on the device as I was driving around, running errands. Came back home about 45 minutes later, now back in my home Wi-Fi range, and success, back to normal. So far 9+ hours of reporting my correct location over Wi-Fi.

They will most likely close this ticket at some point in time, but I will continue to update this thread as information continues to come in. Also, I have NOT indicated to HTC that my issue seems to have been resolved, wanting to see if more information comes through.

-DanDroid

 

[jdk2]

Mine sprang back to life this afternoon as well. Maybe there were some gremlins in the server but its working now and I've been in and out of 4G all day.

 

[androidisforporn]

I've had issues with weather and time zone changing on me, very scary when you're suddenly an hour late...

I'm now experiencing google contacts not syncing, but the calender and gmail will.

Both problems have happened with stock and root, I'm clueless

Edit: this may help with people syncing google contacts

I had the same issue. Go to Settings>Applications>Manage Applications>Running select Contacts Storage and Clear Data. Then try syncing.

Thank you thank you thank you!

I had previously tried clearing data from the people app with no luck, it looks like my google contacts are loading now after clearing 92mb from the Contacts Storage cache!