[Verizon Galaxy S 5 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Michael503:
Yeah, I know the title said GPS, I'll get to it in a bit.

I got a Verizon S5 early on and I have a 64G card that I use for music storage. I Bluetooth a lot to my car in a my 1 hour commute. Almost since I got this thing, the music has skipped semi-randomly. Seems like it did it at a specific spot in the road, but most likely it was just random. Some days were way worse than others. Research indicated this was not an uncommon problem with android. Tried lots of things, but like prayer, who knows if it worked or not. some days maybe yes, some days maybe no. This same memory card worked flawlessly in my AT&T S3.

Then I noticed the GPS was wonky. I got a GPS test program and determined that only pulling the battery out would fix the weak reception, and then only temporarily. This went on for a week, so I called Verizon and a "tech" recommended I do the dreaded factory reset. Did it..nada, nil, zippo.

During the frequent removal of the battery to do a soft reset, I damaged my "KLIX Hard Case" by Empire, so i ordered another one. I used the phone with no case for about a week and had no GPS issues, but did still have BT music issues when played from the SD card.

I got the new case 3 days ago, snapped it on and the next day noticed GPS was out again. I kept removing the case, slowly snapping it down and confirmed GPS went away only when the case was all the way on. During this testing process, the power button finally quit working. A reboot via battery removal revealed it was hardware related (couldn't turn the $#@ phone on). I gave it a thought, and opened the back and pressed on the plastic near the power button and it started working. I then, after some experimentation and a few beers to get my fortitude up, placed the phone, screen down on a hard flat surface and began pressing down on the plastic near the power button with some force. I heard something snap into place.

No more issues so far, with BT music or GPS with or without the case installed. Pretty sure GPS is fixed, but need another week to verify BT music.

My best theory so far is that because the phones chassis is made of plastic, and the buttons and antenna are in that plastic chassis, and the main board sandwiches between the screen and the chassis, that the very rigid tight fitting phone case was slightly deforming the chassis, causing it to bow upward slightly, aggravating an already bad contact situation between the mainboard and the chassis. I other words, the phone case was squeezing them apart. There is a possibility, that I will not pursue, that the main board was not snapped down properly at the factory. Since there are many touch only connections (antenna, buttons, card slots) between the main board and the chassis, A poor snap fit would make this a possibility. You can see how the phone is assembled here in this tear down pic.

http://www.techinsights.com/uploadedImages/Public_Website/Content_-_Primary/Teardowncom/Media_Resources/Marketing/Samsung_Galaxy_S5/Si36811-teardown-8.jpg

Anyway, I thought I'd post this for folks trying to track down a similar problem. Hope this helps someone. Don't crack your screen on my account. :crying:

EDIT: Bluetooth music is dropping out again, both from the card and the internal storage on the phone. So bad this afternoon, I turned it off, It was fine this morning, so none of this fixes BT streaming. GPS still works though.