Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Bluetooth headset stopped after Android upgrade

The other day Verizon released an OTA (over-the-air) update of Android for my work Motorola Droid 4 smartphone.   I installed it when the noticed arrived and the reboot appeared to work just fine.  I had a Plantronics Voyager HD headset that I purchased about a year ago on Amazon paired with the phone prior to installing the Android upgrade.

I connected the bluetooth headset and was able to listen to my favourite radio station via the TuneIn application I purchased some time ago.  Sound was just fine and the headset connected right away.  I received some phone call while the headset was connected and noticed I could hear the phone ring through the headset but I could not carry on a conversation using the headset.  I had to switch back to the smartphone. 

I used my wife's phone to make calls to my cell phone.  After about a half a dozen attempts I decided to delete the headset bluetooth profile and re-discover and pair it again.  Once I did that, the bluetooth headset could be used for both music and phone calls.  Who would have known.  I also am glad to report that my headset also connects more consistently with the new Android version.

All contacts are missing on HTC EVO 4G phone

My wife has an HTC EVO 4G phone that all of a sudden appears to have lost all the contacts.  Since this phone is running Android, I was pretty sure my wifes' contacts were safely stored in the Google cloud somewhere (I set up her phone and created her Google account and set it as the default for the phone).

I was leaving on a business trip later in the morning so I did some Googling and found a post where someone said to clear the Contacts application cache and restart the phone.  I noticed right away when I looked at ALL applications from the system settings why her contacts were missing.  There was a button at the top right that said Enable.  After talking to my wife, I discovered that her son had tried to move apps to her SD card to free up space (the HTC EVO 4G has little internal storage).  The Android Contacts app had the Move to SD card  button disabled and I am almost certain that my step-son accidentally disabled the contacts when he meant to move the app to the SD card.

The moral of the story: if there are no contacts, make sure the Android/Google contacts app is enabled.