[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam General] christopherwoods:
Ok, this is a real doozy.

This happened on my original Hermes, and now it's happening on my (three day old!) new one too (just tried to Ring Areti Internet to speak to someone on behalf of one of my clients, and the moment I pressed 0 to speak to someone the microphone seems to just cut out).

The root of the problem is: I can ring a number, whatever, and if I get to a menu system, I tap in the appropriate number to navigate through the system. However, the moment I do so, when I do eventually get through to someone they can't hear me. I can hear them fine, but my microphone has totally cut out - and even trying things like hitting mute / unmute makes no difference.

If I don't press a button, and either hang on until the menu system just puts me through to someone, the mic works fine. The worst thing about this problem is that it's unpredictable; it can happen all the time or it can just happen every so often, and there's no visual or audio indicators to say otherwise that the problem is occurring.

My two Hermes models are quite vastly different in model: the old one was an HT634 and this one is a 643, so the question of the problem being a hardware one spread across several models doesn't apply. This is REALLY ANNOYING, not only does it piss off the person on the other end but if you're stuck in a queue waiting to speak to someone for 20+ minutes, finally getting through and finding that you can't be heard is TOTALLY ANNOYING!

What's even more confusing is this: I thought it might be a permanent problem, so I tried ringing my home phone, then getting my friend to make like an interactive menu system and just say "press 1 to test this, press 2 to confirm that this is a really stupid thing I'm having to do for you, press 3 to confirm that you don't mind me hitting you after we're done testing this idea of yours"... You get the idea. I pressed a button (more than one in fact, the second time I tried it), waited the appopriate length of time that it would take in the real world to get connected, and started speaking - and the person on the landline could hear me fine.

The problem was also present (and intermittent) on my first Hermes, but it was unpredictable. I'm not in a great 3G signal area, and as I look at my phone at the moment it's gone back to GPRS. I also noticed on the MoDaCo forums that some people in London were suffering from problems where they couldn't hear callers, but the person at the other end could hear them fine (they suppose, as they weren't hung up on even though they couldn't hear their caller) - they had to force their phone back to 2G to resolve the problem. However, my microphone doesn't cut out during normal phone usage, so it's just really bugging me that I can't figure out why the hell this is happening!

My Hermes is pretty much stock: T-Mobile ROM, nothing cooked or patched, I just have the odd little bunch of harmless utilities installed: a screen cap application, Map24 Mobile, Microsoft Reader, Media Metrics Meter (usage tracker, you get paid £5 a month for submitting your stats to them so it pays for the Web 'n Walk), Opera Mobile, TCPMP, SMSDRFix, Vibra Switch, WM5NewMenu and Total Commander... They're the only significant additions.

This is driving me nuts! I never had this problem on my old Alpine, though granted it was on O2. I've even had this problem when calling the T-Mobile support line! Which as you can imagine is MOST frustrating.

Anybody have even the faintest idea as to how to solve this problem? It SEVERELY hinders my ability to ring any kind of helpline or support / sales line... And until I found an alternative (direct dial) number to get through to T-Mobile Customer Services, I wasn't even able to ring them! :(