Screen is freaking out all of a sudden.

[Card]

Okay, here's the deal. Lately, the screen on my D1 has been going haywire, and it's really starting to get on my nerves.

Sometimes it works fine, but now more often than not it won't recognize taps, swipes, or so on correctly. To make matters worse, anytime it stops recognizing my taps, the screen goes unresponsive for about 10 seconds, then flips out and starts acting like there are a bunch of phantom swipes. If I'm on the home screen, it will slide back and forth across the screens, if I'm in the App Drawer or any kind of menu, it just keeps scrolling all the way to the bottom. If I try to scroll back up, it goes immediately back down. Angry Birds is pretty much unplayable now [ ] as it just shoots back and forth across the screen and flings my birds all higgledy piggledy. Seems to have the same issue in every app/menu. I've tried every method I know to restart the phone (rebooting, shutting down, pulling the battery), none of which works. Even answering the phone calls or unlocking the device have become a handful, as it only registers my swipe about 50% of the time for these actions.

A little bit about my phone. Like I said, it's a D1. It's rooted, Cyanogen 6.1.2 (was on 6.0 when this issue started, and updated hoping it would help. It didn't), factory CPU clocking. I haven't added any new apps that I can recall around the time it started doing it, which was about a week or two ago. The phone hasn't seen any serious drops or exposed to liquids (the moisture strip still looks normal). The keyboard still works fine, and the physical buttons all function exactly as they should.

Any ideas as to a possible fix, or should I just wipe the data and cache, flash it back to the standard FroYo, and bring it in for service? I'd like to avoid the latter option...but on the other hand, I'd like to have a fully functional phone again too.

 

[Card]

82 page views and no one has an idea? Makes me sad. I really don't want to have to go through the hassle of restoring my phone to factory and getting a new unit all over again. And despite how much I'd like one, I really don't want to drop the dough on a Droid 2.

 

[DF Smod]

Do you use the stock Moto charging block and cable ?

 

[coondogg97]

I had that same problem two weeks ago. We were in Orlando on vacation no less, so I couldn't do much troubleshooting.

For three days I tried different ROMS and kernels and nothing seemed to work. Again, I was on vacation so I only had time to troubleshoot while standing in line and such. But nothing seemed to work at all. No matter what ROM, kernel, ROM/kernel combo I tried I had the same problem. Phone would be fine for a few hours and then just start wigging out.

I ended up unrooting my phone and going back to stock. That full reset seemed to do the trick. It has happened two times since the reset, but a simple battery pull solved it.

 

[coondogg97]

Do you use the stock Moto charging block and cable ?

Out of curiosity, why do you ask?

My phone is constantly in and out of the Moto Desktop dock. Would that have something to do with it?

 

[tommyb38]

You could try one of the dock blocker apps that are out there and see if it stops doing when the docking app is blocked. I would also recommend if you are using a screen protector, which you should be, to try replacing that. Last, but not least, are you using any task killers or antivirus?

 

[janson745]

I had the same thing happen this summer. Turns out it only happened when my phone was in my pocket and subject to some moisture (sweat). Once phone sat on a table for a few minutes, everything is fine. And anytime that I have my Droid in my pocket and I have been hot it does this.

Droid screen plus moisture, even humidity, dont mix.

 

[phoenixdroid]

I just recently had a similar problem with d1. It was doing those things and more like calling amd texting people on its own, opening apps, adding numbers on the calculator etc. I was totally stock. Verizon wiped the phone and it didnt help. They said the screen was broken ie not cracked or wet or anything jusy history. Had to replace the phone.

 

[harrellj]

Do you use the stock Moto charging block and cable ?

Out of curiosity, why do you ask?

My phone is constantly in and out of the Moto Desktop dock. Would that have something to do with it?

Its a common problem a lot of people seem to have with non-Motorola cables, when they're used, the phone goes weird.

 

[Card]

Haha, I got a ton of replies at once, awesome!

Well, let me go ahead and try and put some more info out there.
Docking, yes I do use the Motorola home dock and car dock, as well as the factory USB cable. It seems to read docking and undocking without any issue.

-I do not use a screen protector. The screen itself (both the glass and the pixels underneath) seem to be completely undamaged.

-I don't use task killers or anti-virus on the phone.

-It seems to do it regardless of temperature or humidity. And as previously stated, the moisture strip is still reading dry as the day it was born.

Haha, maybe there's a bizarre magnetic field affecting Orlando and it hates Droids, as that's where I'm at.

 

[furbearingmammal]

Clean your screen with a good glass cleaner, remove any screen protector you may have on and replace it with a new one, do a prox reset -- reboot the phone with your finger over the proximity sensor so it relearns what is and what isn't close.

If that doesn't work it might be software and a hard reset is in order, or it could be a failing digitizer.

 

[fdkatz]

I just spent a couple of weeks in Costa Rica--very humid. After a few days, the screen simply stopped responding to touch. I tried a hair dryer near it and it started working again, but then stopped and was no longer responsive to longer bouts of hair dryer action. I sadly called Verizon and got one of those wonderful refurbished D1s. It is working fine, if a little looser than my original one (as I never opened it up to use the hard keyboard). I do think it is a moisture thing. Of course, I am back in the desert.

Good luck.

 

[Card]

The funny thing is that I live in Orlando, where it's hot and humid 9 months out of the year. It's only really been an issue on my phone for the last week or two...and go figure it's actually cool (cold for us, a couple nights in the 20's) and the humidity levels have been very low.

 

[Card]

As of tonight, it has gotten so bad, the phone is practically not functional. I can not access anything, the drop-down box is constantly going up and down, preventing me from even using the keyboard. I'm so ready to just wipe everything, un-root it, and take it to VZW in the morning. But as long as it's doing this, I can't even accomplish that.

EDIT: I managed to wipe and un-root the phone, after about 45 minutes of fighting with the phone to let me input anything. I'm back to standard 2.2. Makes me sad to lose all the awesomeness, but on the other hand, the problem seems to be alleviated so far. The touchscreen is no longer going ballistic, and it's registering all my taps and swipes. The odd thing to me is that this would seem to imply that this is a software issue, not a hardware issue. Now I'm trying to decide if I should try and root the phone again and just go with a different ROM and kernel.

EDIT x2: Nevermind. It was working great for about 15 minutes, now it's doing the exact same thing. So apparently there's something horribly wrong with the phone. Oh well, at least I got it reset and un-rooted (and even got the 2.2.1 OTA update during the 15 minutes of proper use), so I suppose it's off to my local VZW store after I get out of work in the morning. I'm going to be very unhappy going back to my LG Voyager with the crushed screen for the next few days.

 

[Card]

Alright, got an update for you all. The situation with my phone has gotten worse. Once the screen starts screwing up, the phone is about 75% non-functional. And it generally starts doing it within 30 minutes of a reboot.

So, here's how my night/morning went. I figured, maybe it's an issue with the kernel or the ROM I'm running. So I un-root it, do a full wipe, and reset it to factory settings on the standard 2.2.1 Android OS. Still screwing up. So I call Verizon, they tell me to do a factory reset. I do it again, still screwing up. They tell me to take it to a VZW store to have a tech look at it. Tech looks at it, sees it screwing up, says we need to do a factory reset. I tell her I've already done that twice, but she apparently doesn't believe me, so she does it again. Go figure, still messed up. So she looks up my account, and informs me I'm 3 weeks out of warranty. I remind her that I had to get a new phone in January because my original D1 bricked itself (never rooted or modified it in any way, just got stuck in an infinite bootloop without even being able to boot into recovery). She says that the new (refurbished) phone they sent me doesn't extend the warranty at all, but if I want, they can fore-go my "New every 2", which is up in 6 months for $30 and buy a new phone, or I can pay $90 for my insurance deductible to pay for another refurbished D1.

So here are my options as laid out to me by the "tech":
1. Pay $30, then pay another $200 for a Droid 2 or Droid X.
2. Pay $90 and get another refurbished Droid 1, that will probably break.
3. Re-activate my LG Voyager (with a cracked screen) and keep my current contract for 6 months.
4. Buy a new phone at full retail price without extending my contract.
5. Deal with a broken phone until my NE2 is up in June.

It's messed up that I've been a loyal customer for over a decade now, never missed payments, never broken contract, and bought several phones at retail before my contract was up for renewal...and they treat me like I'm just trying to con them into giving me a free phone. It's absurd. Haha, you can probably tell I'm a little frustrated. I still haven't been to sleep after pulling my 12 hour night shift. So I'm going to take a nap, then call Verizon and tell them that I'm more willing to pay my contract termination fee and go to Sprint or T-Mobile than give them any more money