White Noise Reboots Tour

[waldocreed]

I recently purchased White Noise (2.0) for my BlackBerry Tour thru Bb App World. I haven't used any timer features, but after about 15 minutes, it makes my Tour reboot. It's done it every time without fail. I've only used it 3-4 times and the last one was run just as a test to see if it would do it. Is there a fix for that; if not, can I get a refund? Thx

[toddm]

Sorry your having problems with White Noise. This is the first time we have heard of this issue. Does every sound cause this to happen? Can you try the White Noise sound and let us know as it requires the least amount of memory to loop. I would think the phone would reboot because it ran out of memory or there is a firmware issue. Our application does not allocate memory while the sound is playing which is why this is puzzling. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this. Cheers, Todd

[waldocreed]

Tried the 'white noise' sound as you suggested and it rebooted in about 5 minutes. That's even faster. The two sounds it died on before were 'beach' and 'crickets'.

Is there something I can look at to see if it is the memory issue?

[toddm]

After googling reboot issues with blackberry there is a lot of information out there. I've read a few suggestions such as pulling the battery to reboot, freeing up storage by removing files/apps etc, reinstalling the OS, updating the firmware, and if nothing else having blackberry replace the unit. Here is a guide that you may find useful:

http://crackberry.com/blackberry-101-le ... blackberry

I hope this information helps and please know thousands of BlackBerry users have no issues with White Noise which tells us it is most likely something else causing your reboots. Please let us know if anything fixes your issue.

Cheers,
Todd

[waldocreed]

I don't need to reboot (and I have no trouble rebooting when I want to): I need it to NOT reboot (when running the app).

My device only reboots spontaneously when using 'White Noise' and has never rebooted spontaneously at any other time and it spontaneously reboots every time 'White Noise' is left running for a few minutes.

The app is non-essential. I can't justify spending possibly hours completely overhauling my device for it when I have no other problems. If it's an unknown problem to you and it's the only app my device has a problem with, then I don't think it's worth either of us wasting any more time on it trying to figure out why. For me to completely dump and reload my BlackBerry for this little app would be like buying a throw pillow and then finding out it doesn't really match the couch, but instead of simply returning it to the store, buying a new couch and redecorating the entire living room to match the throw pillow.

If no other people are having this issue, then I wouldn't consider it reasonable for you to figure out a fix for one out of thousands; if I have no other problems with my device except that it doesn't run one small app, then I don't think it's reasonable for me to have to take extraordinary measures to fix it either. I think it must just be a fluke that your app happens to not run on my device: stuff happens.

So, may I simply get a refund instead?

[toddm]

Refunds are handled by Digital River, the company that processed your payment:

Here is the BlackBerry App World FAQ:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers ... ld/faq.jsp

And it answers the refund question with the following link:

http://store.digitalriver.com/store/rim ... fSaleInter

Please know that they are the ones that currently have your money. Months from your purchase date we get a portion of the revenue after all refunds are processed. I wish the process was simpler but there are four companies involved in this small transaction--BlackBerry, Digital River, PayPal, and us. We do not have a way to verify you even purchased the application as we don't see individual orders. That is why you have to go through Digital River to request a refund.

[landeisj]

My wife and I both recently purchased a couple of Tours and we are having the same issue with all three of the white noise apps on both phones. Are you sure there isn't a fix for the issue? It won't reboot the phone every time. I would say about 70 % of the time our phones reboot. I have tried turning off the connection and any programs that might be running in the background to no avail.

[waldocreed]

To follow up on their referral for me to go to Digital River/App World for a refund...

Let me translate DR's refund policy from legalese to English for you: "unless you were unable to download the app, there's no way you're getting a refund." Or, alternately, "ha ha, we got yo money, suckah!" I think there was some vague referral back to the software developer in there somewhere.

I was a little suspicious of tmsoft's claim they have *never* heard of this problem out of *thousands* of users, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt and chalked it up as a fluke. However, now that I hear of two Tours with the exact same problem, I'm suspicious.

Basically, all I got was the run-around. My only remedy seems to be to give it a bad review and to kvetch about it to whoever will listen.

Good luck!

[toddm]

It does appear Verizon attempted to rollout a new firmware 4.7.1.53 that fixes various bugs including a device restarting issue. Are you guys activating the morning alarm feature while running White Noise?

http://www.dcellphone.com/blackberry-to ... eless.html

* Improved MMS notifications
* Improved Visual Voice Mail app
* Improved sound quality for Bluetooth headsets and voice calls
* Fixed geo-tagging error in the camera application
* Fixed an error with DRM music skipping
* Improved video player
* Added BlackBerry Messenger update notifications — check for new BBM updates automatically or manually.
* Fixed an issue with device restarting after activating morning alarm
* Fixed an issue with memory cleaning and sluggishness
The first character is no longer duplicated when dialing from the
home screen.
* Your smartphone may not have detected headset removal, causing it
to remain connected to a disabled headset.
* When prompted to add an email account in the Setup Wizard, your
smartphone may have jumped to “Bluetooth® Setup,” leaving you
unable to navigate back to email setup.
* If you tried to save changes to a contact that only contained a
company name, you may have received the error message “Contact
updated externally. Changes will be lost and the view closed.”

[landeisj]

I am not using any alarm features on my phone whatsoever. A little more information that I did not put in my last post. It does not seem to matter what sound or what program. As I had previously stated, we have all three white noise apps and all three will do it. When a restart occurs, the selected sound will first pause, come back on, and then the restart will occur. I'm going to try the firmware update and see if it does not resolve the issue and I will report back.

[waldocreed]

I don't know where the person who wrote that article got that information, but 4.7.1.53 is not available from Verizon. There are different versions available for download off the internet (including leaked versions of 5.0), but, according to Verizon's tech support, installing them would void my warranty. VZW also confirmed that 4.7.1.40 is the latest version that is approved by and available from VZW. I am anxiously awaiting that release to fix another problem, but they would not even tell me if they are working on it (I'm also anxiously awaiting the end of my contract with VZW so I can dump them like 10 lbs of you-know-what in a 5-lb bag and get an iPhone).

[waldocreed]

I had the identical pause-restart hiccup when mine crashed. I also noticed once that a screen with something that might be an error message appears during the pause, but only for a second: far too fast and small to have any hope of reading.

[landeisj]

I have to concur with waldocreed. I am also unable to update my firmware. Using the automatic update feature in my options menu, I am told I have the latest version which is 4.7.1.40. Yeah, I want an iPhone as well, but AT&T is crap. Unless you're in a major city, I'd stick with Verizon.

[toddm]

The firmware I was reporting on was an attempted rollout by Verizon. Other reports say they ended up pulling it back due to other issues but they did publish the bugs they were fixing or at least confirming in the current firmware. The more I read about the problems plagued by the Tour, the more we may just drop the platform completely until Verizon resolves the firmware bugs. This is not the first time Verizon has introduced a phone that had multimedia issues (ie--Storm). We spent a week coming up with a workaround for glitches in their multimedia framework which is now well documented on their developer forums. This problem seems a bit more serious given java apps should not be able to crash the OS, which really points to a firmware bug. We are contacting blackberry support and also purchasing a tour to see if there are any possible workarounds. If not we will provide refunds to those with valid receipts. Thanks.

[waldocreed]

Thanks, Toddm, that's the substantive answer I've been looking for.

The longer I own this Tour and the more I read about problems with no fixes, the more I regret buying it. I also blame VZW for a lot of it because their support for this product is lame (and I wouldn't blame you for dropping it).

I think refunds are appropriate if no feasible fix is found. Especially since we consumers cannot be assured *before* purchasing that our device is compatible (unlike PC software than can easily label their product with minimum platform/OS requirements).

I suggest using free trial versions of your software. Even a 3-day trial would have been sufficient to avert all this nonsense. Had a free trial version crashed, I would have deleted it, forgotten it, and gone on with my life never thinking any the worse of tmsoft (if I even noticed that was who wrote a particular app that I didn't keep).