Thursday, December 2, 2010 1:13 AM
Out with friends tonight, they wanted to see my WP7 device. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really show them anything because my phone’s data connectivity disappeared. With my data connection on my cellular settings turned on, and a 3G symbol visible, I couldn’t connect!
Seeing that we were at Boston Pizza, and they provide wi-fi, I get the password and try to connect. While I was able to connect to the wi-fi network, there was no place to actually put the pass code in! So no dice for data.
I come home, and I’m ready to come on here and tear a strip off of Rogers for what must be their network’s issue! Unfortunately, its not.
I’ve been able to connect to my home wi-fi network without any issues ever since I got the phone a few weeks ago. But now, my phone won’t even connect to my wi-fi – it just sits there saying “connecting”. This raises a deficiency in the WP7 device: the lack of a soft reset.
With WP7, you can only do a hard reset from the settings menu. This causes you to lose all your data though, which is obviously a pain. There’s no way to do a soft reset – basically just re-booting the phone, without having to reformat your data.
So I did what I figured would be the logical next step in troubleshooting – I took out the battery, waited a few seconds, then put the battery back in.
Phone booted and voila – I had wi-fi and cellular data working instantly!
I have *no* idea why I lost my connectivity. I was toggling airplane mode throughout the day (trying to save battery life), but I don’t know if that factored in to whatever caused the device to malfunction. I’ve read online also that the loss of connectivity (specifically wi-fi) is a common issue with US WP7 devices.
Long story short, running into this connectivity problem was fixed by resetting the battery. Hopefully this doesn’t become a recurring issue, and even better would be a permanent fix or software remedy in the January update. But we’ll see.
*UPDATE Dec 23/2010*
As Doug Groves points out in the comments, you don’t have to remove the battery to do a soft reset. If you hold down the power button for a few seconds you’ll get a “Goodbye” message and the phone will shut down. Holding down the power button again will soft-reboot it (read: all your data will still be there).