My Google G1 died and then respawned!

While over in Canada, at Niagara Falls, my G1 decided it had lived a nice long life and just stopped working. After two years you become dependent on certain things and my Android-based phone is something I have come to depend on in everything.

So I started to go through emergency life response procedures. Pull battery, clean out phone (and contacts) reassemble and restart; nothing. Take apart, let sit in dry place overnight (it was humid and wet near the falls but the phone didn’t go there), reassemble, plug in charger; no light, nothing. When we crossed over to the US side I used my wifes phone and called T-Mobile hoping to find a store with a battery I could test in the event the battery had spontaneously failed; nothing.

Let me stop here and point out that historically I have received flawless customer support from T-Mobile. Perhaps that is because I always go in and extend my contract and get new phones or simply that they truly provide great care. On this occasion, when I needed them the most they failed. This specific store in Amherst New York (1715 Niagara Falls Blvd) was reluctant to help and did so only after me asking to check with a borrowed battery. No other help or procedures were tried.

After no customer support (four lines with them for the last seven years) I was distraught and eventually angry. At some level I was also desperate. My line is able to switch to another carrier which has an Android phone that supports the 2.x version while my G1 won’t be upgraded. The remaining lines have to wait until November. What do I do until November? We sat down in a McDonalds with my Netbook and used their AT&T free wi-fi to do some searching. Ebay had some new and used phones but nothing I’m comfortable spending money on for seven months of use.

Searching began on Craigslist for both where we were (NY) and at home (AZ). Once again the prices would cause me to add around an extra $15-20 per month to use a phone I was going to get rid of once moving to Verizon. And then I ran across a posting from Quick Fix Cellular of Chandler Arizona and decided to ask them the same questions, with the same data, that I did with T-Mobile. In email they came back in 5 minutes with some basic troubleshooting resulting in a complete system reset.

And just like that the phone came to life. I had 20 minutes till we had to return our rental car and just had enough time to reinstall the OS and all applications. Linking everything to Google apps made it easy since all my data was in the cloud. Right now I’m up and running on an Amtrak train heading to Chicago and was able type this whole posting on the WordPress app with my phone.

Here is the advice that was freely given and I offer with no guarantee or warrany, use at your own risk.

Try this first, perform a factory reset. This will wipe all data and re install the operating system. Take the battery out and put it back in, then hold down the home and power buttons for 20 full seconds, during these 20 seconds the phone may reboot a few times while you are doing this, that is ok. You should see a triangle with an exclamation, at this point flip out the keypad and enter “alt” + “w”. After a few moments the phone should reboot on its own. Let us know if it works!

You can plan for many contingencies while traveling, have back-up plans and hope for the best. What you hope won’t happen is that something goes lost, gets stolen or just simple breaks.

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