Day: July 28, 2020

I had a problem with my new phone that I might have solved. My diagnosis isn’t 100% – I could have misunderstood what I figured out. But it was puzzling, and I was unable to find any clear description or solution in online searches, so I thought I would provide my experience for future googlesearchers.
The new phone I bought is a Blackview BV5500. This is a Chinese knock-off brand – I bought it because I wanted something cheap, and I figured I could sacrifice on matters of quality for now. For the most part, Android-platformed smartphones are so commodified at this point that there isn’t much difference between the many different models and makes. Still, in terms of those sacrifices, I would say the most noticeable is battery life. While my 4-year-old Samsung Galaxy 7 still had an amazing battery life (about 36 hours at regular usage levels) and superfast recharging (full recharge from 2% battery in about 90 minutes), this new phone seems to have about 6-8 hours life at regular usage levels and recharging is quite slow. Anyway. That’s the difference between an $800 sticker price and a $200 sticker price.
The other issue I have is what you might call UI design – not at the Android level (operating system) but at the physical device level. There are only two buttons, and they are placed closely together on the right edge. I really valued the “home” button on the bottom front of my old Samsung.
Where this UI problem came to fore, however, was in the problem I had yesterday and today. Somehow, yesterday, my phone’s basic “phone call” function became mute. That is, I could place calls, but I could neither receive nor transmit sound. I kept testing this, over and over, by calling the house phone (landline) here. The calls were connecting, the landline would ring, but there was no sound on the smartphone. The speaker, and the “speakerphone” speaker (a different speaker), and headphones, and mic, were all mute. But there was nothing in the settings to indicate that anything was muted, no icon, no control, and call volume was set to normal. It was like the speaker and mic had simply been turned off. But it was only for making “regular” calls. Skype calling worked fine. Other media applications worked fine.
The best I could find online was some hint that there was a mute function that could be invoked by pushing both the buttons on the side at once. This was not included in the documentation that came with the phone. And I kept pushing those two buttons, but it wasn’t seeming to change the behavior of the phone-calling application.
I tried so many things. I installed a separate “dialer app” – but its behavior was no different from the native app. I reinstalled a bunch of stuff. I did a full factory reset of the phone. No luck. So not only was the Blackview BV5500’s phone calling app unable to make sound – mute – it was mute about it its muteness, so-to-speak.
I finally got lucky – I pushed the two buttons at once while I was in the process of attempting a phone call. Suddenly, it was working fine.
My hypothesis, based on this behavior, is that the “mute” function invoked by pushing those two buttons at once is “hardware-based.” It doesn’t reside in the operating system – that’s why the factory reset didn’t help. But that “mute” function is only accessible when a call is in progress. The device is “hardware-aware” of that – which makes sense. So the only way to “push the button again” is to do so while a call is in progress.
I could be wrong about this. I was messing with a lot of settings trying to find one that would make a difference, and I wasn’t systematically testing between each little adjustment. But my hypothesis is the only one that makes sense – both in how the problem arose (it arose when fat-fingering the phone to make a call while trying to do something else at the same time), and in how it finally resolved.
I’m mostly writing this for is someone tries to google this problem with their Blackview phone in the future, that they might have a possible solution.
I will now return you to your regularly-scheduled tree / poem / banality.