I have been a Sony fan for many years and many phones. Sadly, after the Z1 Compact things went down hill. The build of the Z3 Compact was of poor quality and it literally fell apart on me after a year or so. So I moved onto a Z5 Compact. The Z5C has been extremely problematic, and it is what I am inquiring about....
My new Z5C is from HK, as I am an AT&T user in the US, and they don't offer Sonys. It is a E5823 specifically.
The new phone worked perfectly for about a week. Then the ear speaker for calls started getting flakey. Some research showed that it would be major surgery to fix, so I hoped perhaps a firmware upgrade would improve things. It did not, at least not the first one. But the Nougat (.376) upgrade did, to my surprise, improve the speaker situation to a small degree.
Note that the phone looks essentially brand new. It has always has a screen protector, so the screen is like new, and the case has done a fine job preventing any scratches there. And I have not yet dropped the phone (despite the fact that I dropped all my previous Sonys more times than I can count). However, there are a host of issues:
- Calls randomly go from earpiece to speaker
- weird freezes on the screen
- blank screen
I was able to ignore all that until earlier today I turned bluetooth on after having bluetooth off for about 2 weeks (europe trip). It didn't come on. I could not find any help, so I decided to try .378. Things went from bad to worse. It came back up with no bluetooth, but also thought it was a prototype (as evidenced on the setup screens -- no, it is not actually a prototype unit). So I tried a few other firmwares -- even going back to the factory load. Each time it thinks it is a prototype -- which I guess I could live with, but still no bluetooth.
I have done a bit of research, and found no matches on XDA, so I thought I might post here in case there are any ideas.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Regards,
Neal
