[Hero, G2 Touch General] dom2114:
Picked up a brand new Sprint HTC Hero on Monday (10/12/9) and within about a day it had stopped working entirely and was swapped out by a Sprint Repair Technician for another brand new one. I wanted to share the issues/experience.

Having spent an entire day fiddling about with the device, I noticed a couple of processes freaking out and needing to be forcibly shut down. I found out that this was because it had 0 internal memory left. I think that this was because I set up my gmail app to sync absolutely all my email to my phone, which obviously took up all the memory.

Without really taking too much time to think, I just decided to do a hard reset of my phone and restore it to factory settings. All seemed to go fine.

But the next day I was noticing that I wasn't not able to receive text messages. I was still able to make/receive call, and send texts, just not receive texts.

Everything worked perfectly prior to the reset: could make and receive both calls and texts, browse the internet etc. - the only thing that wasn't quite working was the bluetooth connection to my car: it was able to pair fine, but anytime it tried to do anything e.g. make a call/play music via bluetooth, the connection would die. However, a bluetooth connection to just a regular headset worked flawlessly.

I spoke to Sprint Customer Service on & off for about 2 hours. They tried refreshing the text messaging service on their end a few times. They also had me check that my phone was correctly programmed: the MDN number had actually reverted back to the temp number I was given (I was porting a number over from TMob). However, even after correcting this MDN number, it still did not work.

I was tempted to just go and get a replacement from the Sprint Store, but there was a repair center about 5 minutes away. Very helpful guy there (who actually ended up staying an hour after his shift was supposed to end) took a look at it.

He was able to replicate the problem exactly as described above. He decided to transfer the number to a different phone (a palm treo I think), and all the test text messages came flooding down. Although this would point to an issue with the phone, this could not rule out a network issue (for reasons that he did explain, but I can't quite remember). He then tried a hard reset himself: didnt do anything.

Finally, he told me that he had a new Hero sitting in the back. He tried setting up this new phone with my number and it worked perfectly.

So in short, my phone is heading to Kansas City (Sprint HQ from what I understand) to be broken down and examined.

Sprint repair guy said he had never seen anything like it before.

Want to also mention that both the Sprint Store salesmen and repair guy were the most helpful people Ive ever met. My salesman was actually on vacation: when i called the store to report the issue, they called him and he called me...very impressive. The repair guy also went above and beyond to keep me informed on the progress (as I was waiting while he worked on it), not to mention him working overtime.

I literally ported over last week from Tmobile and have been blown away by their service.

Just wanted to share the story. Feel free to get in touch if you want me to elaborate on anything.

UPDATE:

The brand new replacement phone has done the EXACT same thing.

Contacted the sprint repair tech. He says that sprint techs have a private internal forum and that the issue has been reported in the past (one of the reports was from a sprint employee who experienced identical problems (on Oct 8th - prior to launch).

From what Ive been told, the internal memory being full is the first symptom of the issue and that android processes begin to be forcibly shut down, and then txt messages cannot be received. Apparantly Sprint/HTC have an idea of what may be causing the issue but have not been more specific than that on the internal forum.

I'm getting my Hero swapped out for a brand new one (for the 3rd time) after work today. I've been advised to keep high-end feature use to a minimum (e.g. google contact/mail/calendar sync etc) until he has heard back from his development team.