I mostly love my HTC One M8. It’s a year old, but still has the latest software, and nothing on the market is compelling enough to get my to trade in my trusty One. Except one thing: the One has been exceedingly buggy on and off lately, and I can’t decide if there’s a better solution than a hard reset.
Here are the issues I’ve been experiencing on my HTC One M8 (mostly since the Lollipop update):
- Battery life. According to GSAM battery monitor, since last August I’ve averaged 13 hours per charge and 6hrs of active use each charge. That’s not great, especially when you consider the bulk of my phone use is phone calls, email, Facebook, texting and RSS. I don’t do much in the way of gaming on my phone, and generally if I’m using Google Maps for navigation I will have it plugged in. Over the weekend I was using Google Maps to navigate on foot through Philadelphia, and my phone was on extreme power saving mode by 2pm and dead by 6pm, after coming off the charger around 8am. I was also using the “Nav Me” app for my Pebble, so the screen stayed off while we navigated, but that didn’t help.
- Freezing and buggy behavior. I’ve had random app crashes, but more often I’ve seen freezes where the entire phone just stops. Sometimes it lasts a minute, sometimes it just sits frozen until it randomly reboots. Mostly it seems to self-correct after a bit, but it’s insanely frustrating, especially when I just need to quickly look something up and nothing happens. I’ve also found the camera app has slowed way, way down, making it nearly impossible to take a quick candid shot.
- Signal issues. I’ve had major issues with handing off between WiFi and cell networks, and flipping between LTE and 3G. When we were on vacation last week, we tried using my phone as a GPS for the car since the Boomsound speakers were nice and loud, so whoever was driving could clearly hear the instructions. Unfortunately, we had multiple occasions where my phone thought there was no connection (despite full bars) and Sarah’s iPhone 5C (also on Verizon) had no issues. Turning mobile data on and off didn’t fix this, every time it happened I had to reboot (which meant further harming my already precarious battery life).
So far I’ve tried slowly removing unused/barely used apps, cleared various caches, and rebooted my HTC One M8 several times…I’m starting to think my best bet is to hard reset the phone and start over. There’s an outside shot I could have a bad SIM (which would explain the difficulty in handing off connections), but I don’t know if that would be causing my other headaches as well.
Are there any apps/utilities I could try before resorting to the nuclear options? Any other tips on troubleshooting a buggy HTC One M8 Android phone?