I just did a simple hardware hack to my HTC 8X phone. I have been having random problems where the phone loses it’s ability to make calls or to send SMS messages. And it will do a spontaneous reboot every once in a while. So I took the SIM card out and stuck some tape to the back of it and put it back in.
These problems has been going on for months and a bunch of people have been complaining about it on the Microsoft and Verizon forums. Some people have been reporting that the problem goes away if you change the settings, but that doesn’t appear to be the fix. I think there are two problems, one hardware related with the SIM card tray, the other one a firmware issue.
The firmware problem appears to be related to what has been reported as an issue with SMS traffic and with which switch the phone is connected to at the time. When this happens, I have to put the phone in “Airplane Mode” and then back to normal. Usually, I get SMS functionality again after doing so. Until Verizon and HTC decide to fix this, there’s nothing else I can do about that. Short of a miracle in the 8.1, I’m not expecting any fixes on that.
The other problem is that the SIM card appears to lose it’s connection with the phone. When that happens I lose voice and SMS and sometimes the phone reboots. That I can try to fix. A few people have reported fewer SMS and reboot issues after padding the SIM card with tape. A couple of pieces of tape are enough to keep the SIM card in tighter contact with the phone. So I took the card out and applied some tape, as seen in the following photo:
You can see the edges of the tape past the edges of the card. It’s actually a MicroSIM card and it fits in a little tray that goes into the side of the phone. You don’t need much tape. I used clear shipping tape, just two pieces were enough. The SIM card tray went in with a snug fit. Hopefully my ability to send SMS messages will be a little more reliable. I like this phone, but being able to make calls and send text messages should be the more reliable part of a phone.