So I got it exchanged and now my new phone is doing the same thing the old one did. It gets stuck reporting it has no service (the icon in the top right). I find that I can make calls just fine and as soon as I press the CALL button the bars reporting service show up in the top right (4 bars actually, not a weak signal). For as long as I’m on the call, the bars are there. As soon as I hang up it immediately goes back to saying I have no service. I’ve tried calling myself from another phone when this is happening and I get the calls just fine. Same behavior actually, as soon as I answer the call, the bars show up. They go away when I hang up. The only way I’ve found to get it back to reporting its correct state is by power cycling it.

This isn’t that bad actually as I can make and receive calls just fine. Where it really hurts is in the car trying to use Bluetooth to make calls. It seems that the phone reports to the car that it has no service (even though it does) and I can’t make any calls. So every time I want to make a call using the car’s Bluetooth system I have to get the phone out, turn it off and then back on, wait for it to reboot, and then place the call.

This doesn’t happen every single time but it’s happening enough to be a bit frustrating. I wonder if it’s the actual SIM chip (or is that absolutely not possible?)? It’s the only thing I can think of that’s the same. Everyone I know with one of these doesn’t seem to have this problem.

I also ended up doing a hard reset on the phone (on the Motorola MPx220, you need to power down and then turn power back on while holding the blue action button) today as I tried everything but was unsuccessful in getting ActiveSync to recognize it and sync with it. So I just gave up and started from scratch.

Still love it though…