My T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile 6 smartphone) started acting oddly about 6 weeks ago. I turn it off each night and it started taking a while to cold start in the morning. It started cycling through the boot process repeatedly every now and then about a month ago. It locked up last night (WiMo screen visible but unresponsive to any button presses. I had to pull the battery to shut it down. Placing the battery back in and starting it up (pressing the power button works), it started cycling through the boot process but never completed. After pulling the battery and repeating this process a few times, I pulled the SIM out and tried it with two other phones. The SIM works with both phones. And, the Dash shows the same power cycling power without the SIM it. So, the SIM is not the problem.
The odd thing, though, is that both phones show me as roaming even after verifying that I’m on the T-Mobile network. Not sure what is going on there yet since I’ve never seen this happen when switching to unlocked phones before.
Randy: Thanks for taking the time help me with this problem. The weather here has been pretty stable. It doesn’t seem like a structural issue though I won’t rule it out. A hard reset seems to have brought it back to normal. Of course, I have no idea how long this will last.
This may sound strange but has the weather changed a great deal lately? There may be a crack in a cold solder joint on one of the SMD (Surface Mount Devices). For devices that do not generate a lot of internal heat changes in weather like hot or cold and even humidity can cause the crack to grow causing all kinds of problems that can often be very hard to track down.
The problem does not get much better even if you find the defective joint, a regular soldering iron can kill an SMD in Nanoseconds is applied incorrectly.