Not a big fan of ol' factory reset of my @HTC Evo 3D to fix sync

Seems unnecessary to have to factory reset a phone to fix a problem that arose from nowhere

I have to say after about ten months of ownership that I am a big fan of my HTC Evo 3D. Yes, the 3D screen is gimmicky and not too useful, but the phone is a great piece on its own and fixed a lot of the previous generation of Evo problems.

The Evo is snappy, has plenty of memory in spite of all the garbage Sprint ships it with, and it has yet to blink with any form of heavy lifting. It has good hardware and specs and the HTC interface you either hate or love and hate (the home screen dock at the bottom has a perma customize button, a feature duplicated in the home menu or by long-press on the home screen; and it can't be reconfigured despite users' outcry).

Anyway, I recently had to contact Sprint due to a week or two of SMS fails and have them reset my position on the network. During that time, my sync functionality with my primary google account (the one the phone uses for the market and mail and chat and basically any google app, including my favorite, Reader).

Initially I thought the account had been hacked. Logging in to google, though, the password was correct and the user name. When I went to the accounts screen, it said there were troubles with HTC Sync and it was unavailable. So I installed the desktop app to see if I could get it working, no dice. When I contacted Sprint to reset me on the network to fix the SMS issue, they informed me that there were no knowledge base issues with Sync and they couldn't help me.

When I asked to verify that my insurance was still active, I was informed that the primary account holder (yes, I'm n a family plan with my mom) had removed it last November, even though they told her I still had it last month. So I mentioned bringing it into the store and they said they wouldn't be able to help me. I can't see how this wasn't a defect of the phone, but according to them it wasn't their problem. It probably wasn't?

Anyway, that issue was in addition to a shorty headphone jack that started pseudo-shorting. When your headphone jack gets worn, it starts to short out and get staticky or disconnect. With the Evo 3D, however, and maybe this isn't actually a shorty jack, the voice control takes over and it tries to act out voice commands incessantly.

This means no walking or bike riding or even standing while listening to headphones. You are likely to inadvertantly voice dial ex-girlfriends, text gobbledigook in the form of poorly translated voice-caps to former employers, and get maps to random places when all you wanted to do was listen to some Cat Stevens during a power outage.

So I did what any self-effacing person does in the face of computer problems; factory reset. Rebooting hadn't worked, powering down did nothing. So I had to do a factory reset, no big I guess, it wasn't my first rodeo. Still, redoing all those settings and breaking the phone back in is a pain in the ass. The lack of a cohesive or obvious way to back up all my apps and settings was annoying, but at the end of the day, a reset isn't too bad.

Still, my headphone jack remains shorty. My phone is unreliable with listening to music, which the Sprint customer service rep upon me preparing to shovel out $200 and sign a contract was all to eager to assure me that it wouldn't be.