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Help a problem with an alcatel phone

reble

Android Enthusiast
Sep 1, 2012
323
40
73
Kennewick Wa
This phone is an Alcatel Fierce 4 model 5056N. On Metro PCS service. The phone works just fine except for the fact. 1 the phone changed (on it's own) the ring tone that I downloaded and set as the phone's default ring tone "orion.ogg", and deleted the "orion" ring tone. And I downloaded an alarm clock ring tone that is a very obnoxious ring tone (guaranteed to wake me up from the deepest sleep). Anyways the phone deleted the "orion.ogg ring tone and installed "fresh.ogg" as the default phone ring tone. And delete the ring tone that I had set for the alarm clock and stuck something else in.
2. The ring tone for an incoming txt doesn't sound period. And the icon on the home page to touch to get into texting page has a little red circle in the upper left hand corner of the txt icon even when the text window is empty.
3. the touch screen is getting funky. Sometimes the screen is overly sensitive to the touch and other times I have to bang my finger on the screen to get it to respond.

OOO 1 more thing. I live in a cell phone hole. It doesn't matter which service I have. I have 1 maybe 2 bars in my room. Outside I get 3 to 4 bars. I have DSL internet with a wi-fi router. I heard that I can connect my cell phone to the router and make and receive calls on my cell phone that way. Is it possible? Or can I put some kind of cell phone booster in that has a mag mount antenna that I can put on the out side part of my window air conditioner?
 
Not sure about the phantom ringtone changes, but you should have WiFi calling on that phone. Find it in the Call settings and choose the setting to use WiFi for calls whenever it is available, then you will be able to make/receive calls through your router instead of the cell network. If you've never used the WiFi calling you may need to register your E911 address with Metro before it will work.
 
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Where did you put the ringtones? My guess is that if they were deleted or the phone lost track of them then it would revert to other default tones (i.e. there is one thing happened here rather than two). So I'd use a file explorer to see whether the files are still there or have really been deleted, and if they are still there the question becomes why does the phone no longer see them?

And you are using the system menus to set these rather than some app? If not, which app and does it have storage permissions set?
 
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I have never used or setup the wifi calling period. I found the instructions online for turning on and setting up the wifi calling. Wifi calling is setup and working

Not sure about the phantom ringtone changes, but you should have WiFi calling on that phone. Find it in the Call settings and choose the setting to use WiFi for calls whenever it is available, then you will be able to make/receive calls through your router instead of the cell network. If you've never used the WiFi calling you may need to register your E911 address with Metro before it will work.
 
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I had saved those ringtones when I backed up (to a cd) all the cell phone app's and other related things to a cell phone that are on my D hard drive in the external USB case. The 2 ringtones are not in the spot on the phone were the other ringtones are stored, nor are they on the phones SD card.

Also questions 2 and 3 aren't answered yet.
2. The ring tone for an incoming txt doesn't sound period. And the icon on the home page to touch to get into texting page has a little red circle in the upper left hand corner of the txt icon even when the text window is empty.
3. the touch screen is getting funky. Sometimes the screen is overly sensitive to the touch and other times I have to bang my finger on the screen to get it to respond.

Where did you put the ringtones? My guess is that if they were deleted or the phone lost track of them then it would revert to other default tones (i.e. there is one thing happened here rather than two). So I'd use a file explorer to see whether the files are still there or have really been deleted, and if they are still there the question becomes why does the phone no longer see them?

And you are using the system menus to set these rather than some app? If not, which app and does it have storage permissions set?
 
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So where did you put them on the phone? The correct places are in the Ringtones and Alarms folders in the pseudo-sdcard (/sdcard). Put them there and the system should use them. If you stored them elsewhere and relied on a particular app then that might be relevant information - since files don't delete themselves we need to find some clues as to what might have deleted them.

As for your other questions I don't know. I've never seen this phone in real life and don't know what android version or launcher you are using (these are relevant to the notification dots). Try clearing the cache for the launcher and message app. A "funky" touchscreen is harder. You may have some app interfering - does it also happen in safe mode (which disables user-installed apps)? It may be a problem with the system software (did you have any updates before it started?). It may be a hardware problem (in which case nothing you do will help). I think that the latter two are more likely than the first, but it's impossible to say at a distance really.
 
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1st off it is Android V6.0.1 on the phone, I don't know about the launcher version. I put the "orion.ogg ringtone in with the rest of the ringtones. And I put the alarm ringtone in it's correct place when I 1st got the phone per the instructions that I have saved. The phone worked fine for almost a year without any problems with the ringtones.
I have suspicion but nothing to back it up with. A certain 13 year old nephew of mine that likes to play pranks and does things to strike back at ppl when he feels wronged. He knows enough about Android phones (he has one) to change and erase files. He doesn't know how to root a phone or get at the boot loader and I am not going to teach him until he learns discipline. But there is no stopping him from looking it up online. I have the ringtone reset for the phone and alarm now. I don't allow updates to update. The last time I allowed an update to install. The phone got all screwed up and I had to do a hard reset and reinstall everything. OOO the red dot on the txt icon is still there in safe mode with all txt messages erased.

So where did you put them on the phone? The correct places are in the Ringtones and Alarms folders in the pseudo-sdcard (/sdcard). Put them there and the system should use them. If you stored them elsewhere and relied on a particular app then that might be relevant information - since files don't delete themselves we need to find some clues as to what might have deleted them.

As for your other questions I don't know. I've never seen this phone in real life and don't know what android version or launcher you are using (these are relevant to the notification dots). Try clearing the cache for the launcher and message app. A "funky" touchscreen is harder. You may have some app interfering - does it also happen in safe mode (which disables user-installed apps)? It may be a problem with the system software (did you have any updates before it started?). It may be a hardware problem (in which case nothing you do will help). I think that the latter two are more likely than the first, but it's impossible to say at a distance really.
 
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