HTC Hero having intermittent text messaging problems?
By Donald Melanson 
posted Oct 26th 2009 3:38PM
posted Oct 26th 2009 3:38PM
There's not exactly much in the way of official statements on the matter just yet, but it looks like support forums have been piling up with reports of text messaging problems on the HTC Hero over the past few weeks, and with no signs of a fix in sight. Apparently, the phone can send texts just fine, but runs into a little trouble when it comes to receiving 'em, with most folks reporting only intermittent problems, and at least some not receiving any at all. Interestingly, the problem seems to be occurring in both the US and the UK, so it would seem to be a problem on the phone's end and not the carrier's, and a few people seem to have had some (brief) success after resetting the device. Of course, there are also plenty of folks having no problems at all, but there doesn't seem to be any question that the issue is out there. So, have you been missing some texts on your Hero? Let us know in comments.
yea have this problem on both sprint heroes that we got. multiple tech support calls, the problems have been fixed, but just yesterday my phone started doing it again. i updated the profile and its working, for now... really getting annoying, doesnt really help that the passion isnt going to be on sprint as a replacement for this phone...
No wonder HTC (or other Taiwanese/CHinese makes) makes some of the worst cell phones that bleed harmful brain-cancer-causing radiations on the planet...
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/27/website-rates-best-and-worst-cellphones-by-radiation-output-leve/
Chinese/Taiwanese = Neglects of Asia
HTC phone rated as highest radiation emitting phones = the results of cheapo/inferior Chinese/Taiwanese housing cases/parts.
http://forums.t-mobile.com/tmbl/board/message?board.id=myTouch&thread.id=31533
lol all the nicest smartphones have high radiation outputs. Especially high end phones that get good reception and attempt to have audio quality always running at the highest level. Talking in 3G needs a lot more power output.
Dear Chinese neglects, vote me down as you will, but the fact is fact, whether you can handle it or not. Tsk..Tsk..Tsk..
No Problems here!!
Ditto.. Know 4 other users directly and none of them have any problems either.
I AM AN HERO!!!
with grammar fail
You...don't wanna know what that means, beckhams...
I google the phrase... and the results were not pretty....
Meme knowledge fail
Was I the only one who lol'd?
Has anyone seen my iPod?
The ranking of the posts in this thread speaks volumes.
And yes, for some users the Sprint Hero is an hero.
I have an unlocked Hero running on T-Mobile US, no problems with anything.
Rooted Euro Hero, kickin ass everywhere. Smooth as Silk
There's a "workaround", install "smstomailbox" which seems to be able to capture the messages even if they don't show up in messages on the phone. I've had my european hero for three months now and so far I have only lost one sms. Still a bit annoying though.
Had the problem on my dutch HTC Hero (as a work around I used SMS2Mailbox). But it was fixed after I installed the 2.73 firmware :)
Yes there are wide spread issues with missing text messages. Dave, updating your profile is not the answer. You will find that you are still not getting messages! I am back to my Blackberry until this is resolved.
Aww, crap, not the kind of thing you want to go "First!" over ... not that I would do that anyway.
This weekend everyone that I normally text with got all mad at me for blowing them off ... I was wondering why Saturday was such a "slow" day. It's working OK now but this is unacceptable. Sprint must have been having some issues though. I'm not buying this "it's the Hero" stuff. The problems started when all of the sudden my phone was shown to be roaming while in the home area and then the time zone was automatically updated to be in South America and one hour off. WTF?
I'm not se
eing it.
Good save.
rea
lly good.
No Problems like that,
had some weird thing with embedded images (not being able to preview them) but got around it by saving them to the SD card first.
I had the headset issue with it no longer detecting when I plugged headphones in but after some restarts it seems to have been fixed on its own.
And Sprint TV still no luck with that in any way shape or form.
Overall I'm happy with it but to any users out there get TasKiller and use it liberally seams the android framework thinks the phone is so powerful its not cleaning up apps as quickly as it should and results in poor battery life when stuff stays open.
This is probably directly related to people going crazy with task killers and killing off critical processes.
I stopped using task killers entirely about a week ago and my phone has been rather happy ever since. Never gotten a delayed text or MMS or anything else yet.
True... but I've had some of the games not present any concise way to exit them and they remained running in the background causing the phone to get extremely hot in my pocket and burn threw a mess of battery life.
@Saul
That's what they should be used for. Some people are apparently setting up Advanced Task Killer and similar programs to just kill every process every 15 or 30 minutes. No surprise their phones are not working properly.
I had the same issue when I was using TasKiller. I put the widget on and didn't realize until I clicked it that it closed all processes rather than opening the program or at least warning the user. I had to factory reset the phone to get everything to work correctly again. I now use Advanced Task Killer only to close processes that I know use a lot of battery. For all you having battery issues, I have found my instant messaging app to be my battery sucking culprit, so if you are using eBuddy or Meebo, consider turning it off when extended battery life is desired.
Or you can just get Taskiller Pro an have it ignore those critical processes. Then scheduling it to kill everything will not result in any issues. In fact, if you use Taskiller, and a Hero, you have to ignore HTC Sense, or you will cause a problem.
My thing is, if you don't know what you're doing, don't do it.
Everyone I have heard having this problem was running some type of taskkiller. Havn't heard it from anyone not running one so just a guess, the logical conclusion would be it is the taskkillers causing some type of issue with sms.
Not having too many issues, apart from what a lot of people have been saying. The messaging app that HTC provides is killing the battery because it causes the cpu to run at a constant 100% when in sleep. Just disable the HTC client and download another one from Marketplace. Handcent works really well!
Exactly...I had a task killer...but then I uninstalled it when I decided to trust that the phone would know when to close whichever application necessary and haven't had a problem. I also don't use the native messaging app, I use Handsent because the native app KILLS your battery life.
No problems with my hero. Still one of the best devices I've had- spanks the Pre, hands down.
No problems here. But I'm trying it out in te store, so..
*the
ugh, keyboard fail.
Sprint Hero here and I missed about 3 days of text messages starting on my 5th day owning the device. Rebooting temporarily solved the problem but who knows when it will stop again.
Another Hero owner with no issues but I do use Chomp SMS on mine. I don't know if that makes any difference....
Jon, this has nothing to do with that. I just returned my original for a new one and the same issue with missing sms directly out of the box with ZERO apps installed and NO apps killed.
Some phones seem to have the issues while others do not.
How long will it take for HTC to fix the following
1. Delayed/not receiving text messages
2. Message App problem
3. Time bug in upper right corner
4. Weather bug
5. Rotating phone from portrait to landscape delay
6. Notifications with trackball not lighting up
7. Not sure if new Hero's are showing Rev A?
i don't think its an HTC issue. Its a Android Issue.
On the article, I caught a brief whiff of a related problem for the Hero and it was that the custom HTC messaging app was sucking battery like crazy and they said they will fix it with an update.
@daguila
I'm pretty sure most of the issues have to do with HTC's custom Sense UI implementation. I haven't heard these issues for those running on vanilla Android and many don't even apply given it only happens on the Hero and with specific apps only available to Sense UI users.
I had the same issue. I was not getting phone calls or text messages, but I could send text, and use all other data services like surf the net and download applications. I did a factory reset on my phone and I had messages from the previous week up until the day I reset pouring in.
Then the stock visual voicemail application stopped working. No matter how many times I reset the phone, the application would not work and kept giving me an error message.
I took it back to Best Buy and they replaced it with no hassle. I now the the phone that says "with Google" on the battery cover and REV A for my 3G connection. So far so good.
I really do not like the fact you cannot truly do a hard reset on the Hero.
Just do what Blackberry users have been doing for years, pull the battery.
n900, as a test, send yourself 10 messages, numbered 1 through 10, and see which ones arrive and how long they take.
It's possible this is an issue with the Software. If you follow XDA-Developers, there are MANY people on that site who have been running the Hero firmware on their G1s and Magics, and this has been a known issue for quite some time.
For the record, my second broken sms phone says Rev A and With Google on the back.
I think it might be a Sprint problem because as of recently my Mogul has been having SMS problems. I dunno!