What’s your most ridiculous hardware failure story?
I’m not slacking on Pocketables, I swear… I’ve got an email into support on one product I’m testing that had issues, waiting to hear back from an interviewee for a piece on the state of unlocking, and am charging up another device to test as I type.
I’m also trying to deal with the higher ups at CG, get the search box working again (top right,) and otherwise dealing with real jerb.
In the meantime this reminded me of some of my biggest failures in tech that happened recently. Read mine, share yours, or not. Starting with one, will add more later.
The audio block
A few months back my wife dropped her HTC One M7 in water. Should have been no problem, turn it off, dry it off, it’s waterproof to a reasonable degree. Except it wasn’t. The device kept powering on. I’d turn it off, it would power on, then power off. The power button was stuck. It eventually fried itself because there was water inside and no way to stop power.
So when my daughter knocked my M9 into the sink (filled with water,) by accident, I powered it off, wiped it off, and threw it into a bag of rice.
There it dried and things were fine for months after… I thought nothing of it.
I was at Pepcom in Las Vegas when I ran across something that piqued my interest. A device called a Boomstick which claimed to make your music sound so much better.
I was intrigued…
I have three songs I use to test audio. I know how they should sound. I mean I *know* how they should sound. They’re the songs I’ve listened to for almost every audio test I do.
I queued those songs up, plugged my phone in, and nothing. No, wait, there was something… they were playing on the speakers. They gave me another Boomstick to try, we noticed it didn’t fit. More people got involved and they were wondering if my case was blocking it. I had no case.
Nope, what I did have was a half grain of rice that had turned to superglue in the audio jack.
I wasn’t able to test that day.
(I’ll add more to this later, have to fill in for a colleague for a minute)
