[HD7 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Heofz:
Hi guys,

So I've gone on the HTC website again and looked at the specs of my HTC HD7 (as I have done many times before, e.g. when I was finding out the official "spec" for GPS on the phone - related).

Anyway, it seems that HTC have recently made a change to the specs page, they have split the internal storage size spec - 8GB for Europe handsets, and 16GB for Asia. I am 99% certain this was not the case a few months ago, it used to just say 16GB.

I happen to have 2 HTC HD7s (one bought from O2, one purchased offline, both acquired within a few weeks of each other - around Feb/March time this year):

Both boxes have the same P/N as each other, and also same model barcodes (6HTGD7XN)

Both boxes have identical specifications printed on them, also identical packaging and contents

Only discernable difference between them is that the O2 handset has a silver kickstand bed and the other handset's kickstand bed is orange.

Frustratingly, my O2 phone started its dying process after the Mango update. It never misbehaved before. Slowly and intermittantly at first, I would get random reboots, giving me "Memory card not working" error screens, setting itself as incorrect time, and even wiped itself a few times (meaning I had to reconfigure everything from scratch). I searched all over the net, checked and tried all sorts of remedies suggested on forums, e.g. doing a full factory reset, uninstalling all the HTC apps, disabling location services, disabling 3G/data connections, etc. Also I hadn't played any music with it since the Mango update either, so it wasn't the music player for which some people reported problems.

Sometimes the phone could go 12-18 hours without so much as a hiccup, and other times it would crash and reboot within a minute of starting. My SIM card has a PIN on it, so I always knew if my phone had rebooted itself. On average I'd say it happened a 2-3 times a day, though some days it would happen 10+ times.

Keeping my data connection turned off and only using Wifi seemed to keep the crashes at bay for several days, at least until today. I'm a fairly tolerant guy, but today was the last straw.

I was playing a new game I downloaded (Jewel³) when travelling to work, when suddenly it crashed and rebooted just like it did so many times before. I rolled my eyes and waited so I could carry on with it until the next crash, except instead of the usual process of booting up and acting normal, it kept crashing and factory resetting itself, asking me to configure the phone for the first time after every single crash/boot. That was it, now it was well and truly buggered. I took it to the O2 shop and they have now taken it in for repair. I assumed the memory card somehow developed a hardware fault, though the timing of when these issues started happening seemed too coincidental with the Mango update.

This is where my spare HD7 comes in handy. I've barely touched it since taking it out of the box brand new about 8 months ago (was meaning to sell it but never got round to it). I threw in my SIM card and began the update process using Zune. All updates successful etc but then afterwards I suddenly noticed the bottom of the Zune window. I went into the phone "about" screen, yep, 8GB total capacity, even though the box says 16GB. :confused:

So what I'm thinking is this: does the Zune Mango update patch actually recognise I am in Europe and try to flash the phone into only utilising 8GB? Even if the memory card has a physical capacity limit of 16GB?

If that's what happened to my first phone, that certainly explains the random rebooting behavior and memory errors, as I probably had parts of my data occupying the space which the Mango patch told the phone to ignore.

Just a hypothesis, anyone here got a 16GB HD7 in Europe which had a lot of data on it pre-mango, and had any similar problems afterwards?

It would also be interesting to know if you fall under this category and haven't had ANY issues since mango. I would like to try getting to the bottom of this, as my searches on the net seem quite fruitless (this was the best thread I could find, though I couldn't reply as I'm not a WP7 developer)