Dell Venue Pro crashing

I received my phone on the 22nd and am having the exact same set of issues you're describing.  In the past 18 hours, give or take, I've had the phone lock up/hang *7* times (edit: make it 8).  That's insane.  I find it's typically marketplace related, though not always.  It seems to have something to do with either network activity or touching storage.  The phone locks hard, the lower back middle/right heats up like crazy and I have to pull the battery to reset the device.  I know of another person who received their device last week and is seeing lockups as well.  I have friends with other non-Dell WP7 devices, and I had a prototype device for months and they nor I experienced anything like this.

I'll be calling Dell as well...I'm extremely unhappy with this device and everything that led up to even getting it.

Please call the US Mobility Queue at 1-800-308-3355, select Technical Support from the menu and enter your Mobile Device Express Service Code.

Thanks,

Amy

Amy,

I went ahead and setup a return/exchange with US Dell Mobility as advised.

One thing I did notice... Some reports have been coming in that some ofthe Dell Venue Pros that went out only have 225 Megs of Onboard RAM vs the 512 that was originally advertised/reported.

I downloaded a "Device Check App" from the Marketplace and have confirmed that my phone does indeed only have 225 Megs of Onboard memory. Is this perhaps a manufacturing issue, or is the phone only supposed to have that much? This might explain some of the issues people have been experiencing.

Please confirm this?

I don't believe there is an express tag...  My box only has a service tag.  When I asked the rep on the phone about it, I'm not even sure they understood the question (not speaking English as a first language), but I think they told me that phones didn't get one of those.

Is there something that tech support could actually do to fix the locking up issue?  I have the same problem.

My DVP has done the same exact thing. Most of the time when it crashes, its due to marketplace, IE, or the Zune player. Each time the only way to fix it is by removing the battery. Yesterday it was near 5 times, today overall it was about 10-15. As much as I love the phone, this is outrageous. The heating is another issue. As mentioned, the phone gets hot on the lower portion, keep in mind the battery doesn't get hot. The battery also seems to die after 3-7 hours of use, depending on what I'm doing. One more thing I needed to mention. The glitch regarding the camera, to where it won't go out of landscape/sport mode once changed. It still has that issue. The only way to remove it is by setting to default. I plan on contacting Dell after the holidays. I'll just have to get used to removing the battery every couple uses. I'm sure they're already stocking up for all the RMAs they're going to receive. 

Also, is anyone else getting a white noise while having headphones plugged in? Its getting unbelievable annoying. I can hear it anytime headphones are plugged in. Its not related to my headset. I've tried 3 or 4 pairs, each being exceptional to audiophile grade headphones. 

Edit 12/24 

I wokeup late for work due to the phone locking up while I slept. I've had to hard reset the phone 3 times within the past two hours. I'm not even using the phone and it does this.. I must say, great christmas present :\

Edit 12/24 

Called in, did a complete wipe of my phone. Still happening. Dell sending replacement unit. Says it'll take 3-4 business days. I guess we'll wait and see. 

Called Dell and they're sending an exchange.  Based on the people posting here with units experiencing the same issue, I'm guessing the new device I receive will behave the same way and that there's a deeper problem here.  Hopefully it won't take weeks to discover what it is.  I do know I'm requesting a refund and moving on to another phone if the replacement unit behaves in the same manner.

I setup the exchange and have yet to receive any confirmation in regards to a replacement unit, and I am starting to wonder if the replacement(s) will have the same issues. What I would really like to know is if the Dell Venue Pro is supposed to have the 256 Megs of Ram it has, or if it was supposed to be 512. The limited amount of memory might account for some of the issues, and i'm certain it's the reason why some of the live tiles on my home screen show up as blank boxes over time.

Last night the phone just crashed as I was looking at contacts, and I was doing nothing on the Marketplace. It just displayed my home screen and it was locked frozen, so I had to take out the battery, again...

On the plus side; I really love the screen quality of this phone compared to the HD7 I had (Xbox Live games look better!). If they could just get the crashing issues nailed down and increase the Ram it would really be the perfect phone, but at this point I think that might be a tall order...

Please read up on how live tiles work before speculating on why yours aren't updating. First of all, there's a hard cap by the OS on how many live tiles can be update (15), which might be the reason why some don't get updated. Second of all, it's the responsibility of your third party web service to initiate the updates to the tiles, and there could be any number of reasons why the third party web service isn't sending the push notification to the Microsoft servers. The primary reason is usually a setting for the app that the user must assign in order to receive the updates.

The bottomline is that phone memory has NOTHING TO DO with live tiles. Microsoft designed the live tiles in a way for the expressed purpose of not consuming any memory.

If your phone is crashing or locking up, it's most likely due to an overheating issue.

Your response on Live Tiles is correct, but that's not what he's talking about and I'm seeing the same thing.  When scrolling through the main, long application list, sometimes the icons just vanish and turn into grey squares instead of the smaller application icon.  This is a good sign the phone is about to lock up once again.  I've seen it happen at least 3 or 4 times so far.

As for crashing/locking up, it is most definitely NOT heat related.  I can bring the phone out of standby, perfectly cool to the touch in all areas, and have it lock up within seconds.  There's definitely something more at play here...

Had mine since the 22nd.  The only casualty was the "Newsroom" app so far.  It boots and then spins off.  It might be a subscription thing, but there is no indication either way.  The back of the phone did get noticeably warm, but that has now dissipated.  Overall, it has been smooth sailing after loading maybe 20 free apps.  I marvel at this phone as it sits next to my antiquated Crackberry Curve.  So long Sprint!   

Regardless of whether or not it's related to overheating, it still seems like it's a problem isolated to specific units that might have build issues. You could just throw up your arms and just ask for a replacement immediately, but the rest of us not currently seeing the problem would appreciate it if you could provide us a little more detail so that we might try to replicate the problem. Only then will we know if there's a design flaw that affects all units. By helping us get some peace of mind, you could also stand to save yourself some time by not having to try out a replacement unit and just buying something else. Having said that, could you provide us some information that might be useful to us? For example:

1. How much free storage space that you have.

2. How many apps you have pinned to the start menu (i.e. # of live tiles).

3. Details about your contacts: # of contacts, how they are syncing (ie. Exchange vs. Windows Live vs. Outlook), etc.

4. Details about your email accounts.

   a. Type of account: Exchange, POP, Outlook, etc.

   b. Synchronization interval setting

 5. Anything else that might be useful.

False alarm. It's not 100% of the time. I was able to get it to lock up within minutes of launching the browser 3 straight times. I reproduced it one more time, but it too much longer. Now it can't reproduce it anymore, and I've had songs playing for about half an hour now.

I also played around with the camera during this time as well. I did find a problem with that though, which I'll report in another message.

Do you work for Dell CB5555? Just curious...lol

Anyway, yes I can be very specific as to which apps eventually showed up as blank blue boxes on my home screen.

Both the "AP News" and "Weather Chanel" apps had this problem.

Over time the tiles just showed up as blank blue boxes. The weather channel app displays temperature and location data, and the AP News app will pull a random image for the current day's headlines. When I owned the HD7 both these apps had no issues, but while using the Venue Pro both tiles eventually became static, and then just displayed a blue box with no information in the tile at all. I should also mention that I did not go over the limit of 15 live tiles during my use, not even half of that.  

I was hoping that the crashing issue was just isolated to a few xbox live games not being able to be installed properly, but last night the phone just crashed randomly while checking Facebook contacts. It will stall, and when you push the windows button to return to the home screen the home screen is just frozen...waited a few minutes, and eventually had to take the battery out.

Just sent the phone back today, so I’m going to see if the replacement pans out, but I am just a tad weary at this point.

Ok so I got the phone yesterday and yes it locked up last night on my like almost 10 times, but I've been using it all day today and it's fine. Now, for me, I really think it has to do with the fact that I was downloading/installing something that was quite large and this was going on in the background while I was navigating the marketplace and other areas of the phone. The fact that I had something trying to install/download in the background seems to have made the phone more prone to crashing. I didn't realize that what I was downloading was so big and was ongoing in the background. I only noticed that today it hadn't worked correctly as the phone had crashed and I had restarted the phone several times.

So in short, for me anyway, the phone seems to crash if you're downloading/installing something large from the marketplace while doing other things with the phone.

Also another note, I never had to unplug the battery to restart the device, if you hold the power button down for about 7secs (give or take) the phone will turn off and then just hold it again to turn it back on.

Hope this sheds some light on the problem, I don't wanna have to return this phone because i actually love it but of course crashing 10 times in the space of an hour is completely unacceptable no matter what so i hope this is resolved soon.

Also how do I check the amount of ram on the phone, if it's not 512 like advertised I will be very annoyed. Lying to people is bad business! :)