[General Questions and Answers] W_White:
VZW i605 Note 2 KitKat problem

Hi all,

I've been following on XDA for years, and have counted on these forums to help me root and ROM my phones since my first OG Droid. I've learned SO MUCH here and appreciate the hard work and help of the mods and devs over the last few years. This community is top-notch!

Now I am having a problem that I haven't been able to find via searches on here, other forums, or Google. Who knows - it could be something really simple, since so many people are using KK ROMs on Note 2s - seemingly without the same problem I am having.

So I have a VZW Note 2, that I unlocked and rooted via CASUAL's "No You Verizon" method. I stayed on stock rooted 4.1.2 with VRAMC3 modem until AOKP released jb-mr2 milestone 1 and moved on to KK development. Other than occasional random reboots, it's been a solid performer - much in the fashion that I've been used to since my old Galaxy Nexus and AOKP 4.0.4.

Well, this weekend I figured I would make the jump to KitKat. Since CM nightlies come out EVERY NIGHT and my buddy has had good luck with them on his i535 GS3, I figured I'd give it a go, as it is my understanding that CM and AOKP are both developed off the same base, and AOKP "nightlies" only come out 3-4 times a month.

SO... I flashed the latest CWM Recovery to my phone (6.0.4.3), wiped Dalvik, wiped caches, factory reset, wiped cache, factory reset, wiped cache again (I don't mind taking a few extra seconds to make absolutely sure I flash a new ROM nice and clean), flashed cm-11-20140501-NIGHTLY-i605.zip, flashed gapps-kk-20140105-signed.zip, then rebooted my phone. Side note: I ALWAYS check MD5s on every file I download. I never put any unverified files onto my phone's storage. Ever.

Everything seemed to be looking good and working alright. I was bummed that SMS was all white, as I have been spoiled by the dark SMS theme from AOKP. Whatever - I'm running KK, right? So I go about my day, poking around the ROM and being all happy that I have a bleeding edge OS on my phone again.

*** Then the problem struck - I got a phone call. As soon as I answered the call, my display went black. I told my caller to hang on a second while I fiddled with the power button to try and wake it up. No dice. Finished my call, which had to be terminated by the caller since I could not see a hang-up button on my black display. After a few seconds, my screen came back, as if nothing ever happened. So then I tried to place a call. As soon as I hit the send button, the display blacked out AGAIN. After I left a voicemail, I had to remove my armor and battery door, then pop out my battery to hang up the call.

I tried clearing cache/dalvik/cache in recovery then rebooting. Same problem persisted. Downloaded the AOKP 4.4 nightly from 4/30 and their specified KK gapps file. Did my preflash clearing process, then flashed AOKP, then the appropriate gapps. SAME PROBLEM. Found a recovery flashable VRUEMJ9 modem file and flashed it. Reflashed AOKP and gapps after my clearing procedure. SAME PROBLEM.

Can I really be the only one having screen blackouts during calls? I can't find ANYTHING related in searches. The best I can narrow things down to is that there must be some sort of Android Dialer incompatibility on the Note 2 that doesn't exist with the GS3 for AOSP KK.

I'm now back to AOKP jb-mr2 milestone 1 for now, happily dealing with only the occasional random reboot.

Please help me figure out what I'm missing. On each of these ROMs, I am only using the kernel that they come with - haven't gotten into mixing and matching. I would have posted this in the dev forum for AOKP 4.4, but as a noob, that is not permitted.

Thanks,

Walt