[General Questions and Answers] bill48105:
HTC Touch Dual (NIKI+NEON) & Fuze problems w/ ATT EP-5632 Bluetooth cordless phone

Hey all,

After searching in google & the XDA built in search for days I'm throwing in the towel & asking for help here. For some reason both my Touch Dual's (NIKI100 & NEON300) have a weird bluetooth 'drop' problem with my AT&T cordless phone which acts like a headset.

I've had an AT&T EP-5632 cordless phone system that links to a cell phone via Bluetooth for about a year & 1/2 now & it has served me well in my home office allowing me to keep my cell plugged in and gives me the ability to use any of my 4 cordless phones to talk on the cell and/or my vonage line. It has had its issues (such as sometimes the Bluetooth link breaks & I have to either turn off & back on Bluetooth on my cell, reboot my cell or power cycle the base) but that happened pretty rarely & wasn't a huge deal. My original phone I used with it was the AT&T 2125 (HTC Tornado) with WM5 & with it I rarely had any problems. After about a year I upgraded to an HTC S710 VOX that came with WM6 and although it fought me hard to do the original link and had the above 'vanishing cell' problem more often than the 2125 overall it was stable enough for me to use it daily making & receiving numerous calls. A few weeks ago I got a Touch Dual (NIKI100) with WM6 thinking I'd prefer a touch screen over full QWERTY to find it lacked the 850 GSM band & 850/1900 3G band AT&T uses but alas it was a new toy so I played with it anyway since we have some 1900 towers around. It too fought to link mostly because the keyboard was defaulting to characters not #'s so I was entering spaces not 0's for the password. lol Once linked I was happily using it with my EP-5632 cordless system via Bluetooth for a few days. One day I was on a cell call & another cell call came in. I was in the middle of a conversation so I let it go to voicemail. BIG mistake! As soon as the ringing stopped I was not able to hear the person I was talking to nor were they able to hear me even though my cordless still showed me as if I was connected (call timer running & not on home screen) & the cell screen showed me connected with call timer running so I quickly picked up the cell phone & they were there! We could talk fine so I hit the OFF button on my cordless to find it hung up my cell call! (So the ATT cordless was still connected via Bluetooth & controlling the cell but the voice portion was no longer being routed to my cordless but rather only on the cell) I quickly dialed the person back with the cordless to find we could not hear each other! I hung up & dialed directly with the cell to find the same thing.. After we tried calling each other a few times unable to hear each other he sent me a text message saying "What happened I can't hear you, can you hear me?" I ended up having to power cycle my Touch Dual to be able to talk to anyone (even directly on the cell not over Bluetooth) & once I did I could use the cordless or my cell AS LONG AS no one called me & I let it go to voicemail. (Tell me that's not odd!) I had already ordered a Touch Dual US NEON300 which arrived that same day so I moved my SIM over & linked it to my ATT to find it does the exact same thing! My 1st thought is that it is either a Touch Dual problem or possibly a WM6.1 problem since my S710 worked & had 6.0 which wasn't as good as my WM5 2125 but worked well enough to use. But both Dual's are worthless with this phone system unfortunately! :(

I broke down & bought a Fuze thinking that was an AT&T phone (I know, still made by HTC) but I assumed it would be more likely to work figuring AT&T would surely test it with their own AT&T branded cordless phone system, right? WRONG! I found a very strange thing. Even though the Fuze has WM6.1 on it, it does not do the same thing the Dual's do! If a call comes in it doesn't 'disconnect' the audio. WOO! The problem is that if I end a call then try to make or receive a call too quickly after it does the same thing as the Duals where the AT&T cordless initiates or connects the call via the Fuze but I can't talk to them on the AT&T! I have to pick up the Fuze & talk on it.. But unlike the Dual's I don't have to reboot anything to get it working again. I just have to wait like 20 seconds after a call completes before making another call. Inconvenient I know but not nearly as nasty as the problem I was having with the Dual's.

I searched & searched & found various people with odd Bluetooth issues linking with cars that sounded similar and many said the problems started when they upgraded to WM6.1 (either upgraded their ROM or bought a new phone with WM6.1) but some said WM6.0 had issues too although WM6 worked for me. Many people blamed Microsoft's Bluetooth stack, others blamed HTC because it seemed it was only HTC made phones that did it.

So my question is can these problems be fixed?

Perhaps with a patch from Microsoft or HTC?

Maybe by installing a different Bluetooth stack?

Maybe there are Bluetooth registry settings that are different (remember 2125 with WM5 works fine, S710 with SM6 works OK, Touch Dual NIKI100 with WM6 does same freaky thing as Touch Dual NEON300 with WM6.1 where the Fuze with WM6.1 mostly works, at least better than either Dual which makes me think it is NOT the WM version)

Could it be the radio version?

Maybe there is a cooked ROM I might try on either Dual or the Fuze that might fix it?

Maybe the issue has to do with the 2125 & S710 both being smartphones vs the Dual's & Fuze being WM Professional touch screen devices?

Perhaps it is some hardware incompatibility like Bluetooth chipset on the phones?

Sorry so long but I wanted to be thorough in case any of the minor details could help figure out the issue. I realize the problem could very well be a crappy Bluetooth implementation in the EP-5632 but from what I found I am not the only one with odd Bluetooth issues especially with HTC's running WM6.1 so even if someone else doesn't have these particular phones or the same ATT cordless system perhaps something useful to many others will come of this.

Thanks in advance for any input or possible solutions.

Bill