HTC Desire GPS Fault - the final word

David Heath
Friday, 07 May 2010 17:55

Your IT - Mobility

Following last Friday's resolution of the GPS issue with the newly released HTC Desire smartphone, Telstra has advised that they were not to blame for the mess.

Following reports that the brand-new HTC Desire was unable to use its GPS system, and a week later that the issue had been resolved with a software update, iTWire asked Telstra to comment on the progress of the issue.

Firstly, we asked what would happen with unsold handsets in various outlets around the country.  Suggesting that they were operating with a very short supply-chain, the spokesperson said:

"Telstra started updating software on HTC Desire smartphones in our logistics centre last weekend [immediately following the release of the software patch]

"This meant that as of last Monday all stock dispatched to stores was shipped with the new GPS and Voice Search software installed

"There was some remaining stock in store. Customers who purchased these units would have been automatically prompted to install the software update when they first turned the device on and it connected to the network. Staff have been asking customers purchasing this stock to complete the update when prompted."

Next, iTWire was interested in gaining an understanding of exactly what went wrong - not for any reasons of finger-pointing, but instead to learn from the mistake and see how to improve the validation process for new software.

We expected to hear that custom modifications made by Telstra had caused the issue, however there was an unexpected response indicating that the cause of the problem lay with HTC, not Telstra; as when asked for an anatomy of the problem, we were told to ask HTC that question, though with a degree of scepticism, "doubt it would be practice for HTC to talk about its production processes though."

HTC has been asked for comment and we await the response with interest.