Poor Quality Control?

[icemanjs4]

I like many of you have been waiting for months to get my hands on the epic.

However when I bought one, the battery life was insanely unusable even after 4-5 days. So I finally returned it for a new on. Well find out over the next few days how the battery performs. But the new one has capacitave buttons that barely respond to touch. Particularly the home key and menu key.

I've read of a bunch of people having similar problems. Are we just a few unlucky people who happen to be on the forums, or is Samsung having serious Quality control issues here?

 

[SamsungVibrant]

I like many of you have been waiting for months to get my hands on the epic.

However when I bought one, the battery life was insanely unusable even after 4-5 days. So I finally returned it for a new on. Well find out over the next few days how the battery performs. But the new one has capacitave buttons that barely respond to touch. Particularly the home key and menu key.

I've read of a bunch of people having similar problems. Are we just a few unlucky people who happen to be on the forums, or is Samsung having serious Quality control issues here?

can you define insanely unusable? how many hours of battery life was insanely unusable for you?

also what phone did you own prior to your epic?

thanks

 

[icemanjs4]

can you define insanely unusable? how many hours of battery life was insanely unusable for you?

also what phone did you own prior to your epic?

thanks

Sure no problem.
Keep in mind I keep 4G, Bluetooth, GPS, etc turned off, only wifi is enabled:

Two days ago I charged it fully before going to bed, then unplugged it. When I woke up the battery had drained to about 70%. The phone hadn't even been turned on yet.

Today I unplugged the phone at 11AM. I checked my mail, and a few web sites, used the GPS for less than 5 minutes then disabled it. By 6PM I was down to 36%. Total display usage was 39 minutes. To me this is unusable.

I have done full charges every night - from <15% to 100%.

I previously had an old iPhone 3G. It used to have GREAT battery life, but after 2.5 years of use it had become pretty bad. Sadly - it was still better than my new Epic :-(

I so badly want this phone to work because it has everything I want in a phone. But if I get this battery life with little use, what happens when I actually want to - I dunno, talk on it, or use the GPS?

 

[Android XTC]

The Evo has the same battery issues. Im not sure why this is happening. It was suggested in the Evo forum that it has something to do with Sprints towers keeping the internals awake and not the phones at all.

 

[xXSecretAgentXx]

Well u must have a bad unit mate. having auto killer and juice defender set up, im getting 12-15 hours after unplugging every day! I can only imagine it getting even better after custom roms and froyo

 

[icemanjs4]

OK, it turns out that there's a post over at XDA that explains some of the problems.
[Q] Time without signal > 50% - xda-developers

There's a bug where the 3G keeps unlocking and searching draining battery power. I checked even my new phone and the "3g Time without Service" was 52%. So I turned on airplane mode, then turned it off, and went to bed with a fully charged phone. 8 hours later, My batter was at 89%, and "Time without service" was 0%.

I have a feeling many things will be better today! Keeping my finger crossed.

 

[kidlat]

Any response to the following:

"But the new one has capacitave buttons that barely respond to touch. Particularly the home key and menu key"

See this problem with my wife's Epic 4g. I have an Evo and don't see this. Is there a correct or better way to touch those keys? Hold down for a few seconds? Double touch?

thanks.

 

[AndroidIrie]

Any response to the following:

"But the new one has capacitave buttons that barely respond to touch. Particularly the home key and menu key"

See this problem with my wife's Epic 4g. I have an Evo and don't see this. Is there a correct or better way to touch those keys? Hold down for a few seconds? Double touch?

thanks.

Yes, a lot of Epics had/have issues with their capacitive buttons being very unresponsive. Some devices work great, others have one bad button, some have multiple buttons that hang and won't respond to successive touches.

Speaking with a repair tech at my local Sprint repair center, he said that they had scores of Epic handsets returned in the first week for this exact issue. The good news is that if you crack your screen, every service center has replacement screens they can repair your phone with. The bad news is that most of them have laggy capacitive buttons.

It's a problem with the screen (top half of the slider). Replacing the screen fixes the issue, but often the replacement screens would actually be defective too, often with a different button that hung up.

You can check to see if your unit is defective - open the keyboard, and experiment with using the capacitive buttons vs the corresponding keyboard buttons. If they do not react the same, your capacitive are probably defective. They should still work, they just lag between touches when the phone processor is running.

But be careful if they offer to replace the screen and not replace the device, as it requires opening up the phone and that can cause several other issues. More bad buttons, loose slider unit, excessive keyboard wobble, just to name a few.

Probably not the response you wanted to hear, but hopefully it answered your question. Good luck with your wife's phone. People I know with laggy buttons accept the fact that they have to wait between pushes and consider it an annoying tradeoff for the incredibly vibrant colors that the epic screen offers.