Constantly fritzing FZ-A1B toughpad - solutions ?

For all its awesomeness hardware wise my FZ-A1B Toughpad constantly freezes up and fritzes itself. Without warning it starts behaving wierdly to inputs then a short time later goes unresponsive totally. Then sometimes it miraculously comes back a very short time later or sometimes hours later or sometimes never. About 7.5 out of 10 times if I touch the power button quickly to put the device into standby mode, it doesn't matter how long before I come back and tap the power button again to come out of standby mode as the unit will be totally unresponsive with a completely black screen.

The only quick fix for these scenarios is a cold-boot by holding the power button down 10 seconds to force it to power off then power on again with the annoying 30+ second Android start up time. Plus if I was in the middle of doing something it's lost.

On some occasions it will lock up then hrs later trigger a reboot all by itself but it never reboots properly and last night it did just that. Fritzed and locked up after working fine for about an hour. I went to bed then this morning it was stuck in the Android boot up phase doing this:



flickr page


And never fully started up.

Surely my fza1b can't be the only one that does this? It's going to get annoying to the point I dump the touchpad soon.... The only way to really confirm it's the firmware (either the underlying Linux kernel, or Panasonic's lame botched version of Android 4.0.3? or both) will be to get another identical unit and try it with a similar suite of apps, etc.

And if it proves to be not just my unit, then getting serious about trying to break Panasonic's prevention of 'rooting' and trying to upgrade to at least 4.4 (Kitkat) just like the FZ-B? models have, would be a smart path to tred.


Craig.

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Panasonic-T...066261?hash=item464c13a3d5:g:ZgQAAOSwoudW60Tu

Here is a working but damaged one for $90,a perfect victim.

 

I use mine all the time and never had any problems like you are having. I think maybe once it froze up on me. So it just might be one of your apps.

 

Here is a little info on mine

Firmware model. FZ-A1BMDM
Device ID. FZ-A1B_3CKSB25954
Kernel version 3.0.8
Built number. IML74K.V1.06L65M0000

 

Have you done a factory reset on your tablet?
On my used tablets that is the first thing I do is restore or reset the operating system.
There are two ways to do it. First is through the settings menu under backup and reset.
Second way is to completely power down. Hold volume down and power button together and as soon as you see the screen starting to boot hit the volume up and then boot recovery.
This will wipe all your added apps and you will need to load them again from google but it should get rid of all the conflicts that may be causing your tablet to freeze.
Hope this helps

 

Yes very first thing I did was a factory reset to drop it back to Android 3.2, then let it connect to the interwebs and it grabbed the necessary 'updates' to get the OS version it has now (Android 4.0.3). Then I started looking at which apps I wanted (and which of the 'factory supplied' ones I would use and wanted to download updates for).

It's very possible that the version of Android being older, the constricted base-level configuration of the Linux kernel used by Panasonic under it, and the fact that lots of apps only fractionally still support the older 4.0 and below versions of Android in their current revisions available through Google's app/play servers, are all combining to produce very flaky behaviour.

That's why I might bite the bullet and get another unit and just see how it goes. Calculated gamble I suppose.

The FZA1's don't have any external volume controls unfortunately. The only buttons are the ones along the bottom. No buttons on the sides or top.