Samsung Galaxy Nexus: the radio crash bug resolution
Two days ago I wrote about my struggle with the first, very serious and very annoying Android Ice Cream Sandwich bug, which causes the phone radio to crash, resulting into behavior like the phone is in Airplane mode and fixable only by phone reboot.
Today I’ve some developments to report:
Switching off 3G mode
When I switched off the 3G, the ill behavior changed dramatically! The phone radio never hung, causing Airplane Mode-like behavior. Instead, the phone started rebooting! With approximately the same frequency, the phone was crashing and causing sudden reboots. I can’t really weight which behavior is “better” in this case: to have the phone rebooting itself, or to have crashing radio. I left it in “crashing” mode, because after I removed the SIM card PIN, at least I was always reachable (when it reboots, usually it restarts OK).
Update to 4.0.3!
In the Google thread about issue 22503, today I found extremely useful comment! The comment suggests that the issue is not seen on 4.0.2! So far I was forgetting to check if there are any updates to the OS. My crashing phone was with Android 4.0.1, i.e. vulnerable to the problem. The commenter stated that after 4.0.2, the issue did not show anymore.
I immediately asked for help how to locate the official update, but alas… it seems my phone is not in the phones, which is being updated by Google (or at the moment). I’ve no idea how this happen, but I was on my own for this one.
That’s when I decided to turn to the good, old xda-developers.com forum!
After some reading there, I’ve got to the conclusion that the only chance to try resolving the issue is to install custom ROM, which is based on 4.0.2 or 4.0.3. After some more reading, I decided to put Android Open Kang Project, a ROM, which has excellent feedback so far and looks like it’s “alive and developing”.
Once the decision was made, I had to get the tools for updating. In the forum, there’s already plenty of useful Google Galaxy Nexus information about rooting the phone. I had to use the following resources in order to do the job:
- Collection of tools and techniques for unlocking the Google Galaxy Nexus bootloader and rooting the phone;
- GNex Toolkit, for pushing the ROM to the internal storage and afterwards flashing it to the device via Clockworkmod Recovery tool;
- The forum thread of the Android Open Kang Project, where I’ve got the actual ROM, opinions, and where I’ll keep tracking the development of this ROM.
It took me about hour, hour and a half from start to end. The whole thing was 5-6 hours ago, no sudden restart of cell hang so far. The phone is cold, no battery overheat and the battery discharge rate looks times better than before.
I hope this is the end of the saga, but if there’s more on this topic, you’ll most probably read about it here.
