Does Leaving Your Battery Out Fix Your Problems, Too?

[David McNamee]

I had a frustrating experience with my MPx200 this week. I went to dial a number, and was presented with an invalid SIM message. I instantly went into troubleshooting mode. First, did I pay my bill this month? Yes, so I should be okay from a service perspective. Time to cycle the power. I leave the power off for a couple of minutes and turn the phone back on. It took nearly ten minutes for the phone to boot and show me my home screen. A minute or two later, I get another SIM error. I pop the SIM card into another phone and get a signal straight away. That means it's a problem with the phone.... great :roll:

The final troubleshooting step before throwing the phone into a lake is to do a master reset. I push the big blue button and turn on the power. I select the master reset option and hold my breath. The phone starts to boot - first the Motorola welcome screen, the the mobile operator screen, and then...

... Then the phone reboots itself before showing the home screen. Then it restarts again. And again! It continuously cycled seven or eight times before I finally yanked the battery out. About this time, I start going through the features of the other Smartphones on the market trying to decide which one I want to buy. I left the MPx200 disassembled when I went to work the next day. That evening, 24 hours after this mess started, I put the battery back in the phone and turned it on. If it was still misbehaving then I would be going phone shopping.

I inserted my SIM, put the battery back in, and turned on the phone. This time it worked! Has anyone else had their phone take a day off like this?

[NYC567user]

I've seen this problem in other phones....not on the E200...
But this is how it has been fixed in the other phones...
See if this works for you.
It's your SIM....somehow the contacts have gotten weathersized on the sim and they are not fully touching your phone contacts.... there is no 100% contact thus a misreading from the phone on the SIM.
What has been done before is to either clean your contacts with some kind of alchol swab...I've even had to scratch the metal on the sim to get it working...

[Graffiti]

I agree with NYC567user's analysis of the problem & the fix. Another way you could clean the contacts - not only of the SIM card, but the SIM holder in your phone - is by using a large pencil eraser. Give it a few good rubs (not too hard on the phone SIM contacts), blow off/dust off the rubber remnants using a soft brush, and you're all set to go once again.

Contact oxidation is the #1 reason why phones present invalid SIM messages.

[David McNamee]

Good tips, thanks! I'll keep that in mind next time I see an invaild SIM message.

[brianchris]

Well, the same thing has just happened to my Wife's MPX200. I remebered I read David's posting on the subject, and immediately found this thread again to review people's replies / thought on the subject.

While I appreciate Graffiti and NYC567user's thoughts on the cause, and I'm sure oxidation is the #1 cause (as they state) for this problem for GSM in general, when reducing focus to just MPX200 units, the cause for this error on those models *may* be different.

Why? First and foremost, why did a hard reset of David's Smartphone solves the problem? Indeed, the Microsoft Smartphone 2002 OS, while ambitious and desirable, may have ghosts in the machine......it is, after all Microsoft's first shot at a phone OS, and they've already released a newer version (Smartphone 2003).

Second, all MPX200's are fairly new (including my wife's and David's I'm assuming)....why would SIM cards in only MPX200's oxidize faster than other phones (I've used both a T68m and now a T616 with the same SIM for a couple years now and have never seen this problem)?

Indeed, I believe it to be either an OS bug, or more likely, a hardware design flaw. Specifically, at least on my wife's MPX200, there is no top SIM card holder, only a sliding bottom holder that (barely) lock the SIM card in place. Apparently the designers thought the battery would hold in the SIM card in place of a top SIM holder. My first question is, do all MPX200's lack this top SIM holder (I can produce a picture if needed)? If so, what is most likely happening is after a couple months of use, the SIM card, being fairly loose, gets scratched by the contacts and becomes less and less reliable over time. A new SIM card fixes the situation, but again, only for a couple months until the new SIM card becomes scratched. This theory, however, can't explain why a hard reset fixed David's.

Bottom line, a lot of questions remain.