Sprint has halted shipping new LG LX260 Rumor units to stores. The LG Rumor has a known issue where certain sets of key presses during startup can trigger a complete erasure of the phone’s firmware.
Sprint has isolated the issue to a specific debugging menu, intended for LG engineers to work on the device during development. Unfortunately, the menu is triggered by accessing the main menu, and/or dialing phone numbers. Sprint has not disclosed the specific code, to prevent abuse.
Clarification: The trigger is timed to function only at start up. To work around the issue, we suggest not pressing any buttons on the phone for at least 30 seconds after it has fully powered on.
The phone, once triggered, cannot be restored except at the factory. The debugging code even erases the portions of the firmware that would allow a Sprint Store to recover the device (requiring what is known in the industry as a JTAG restore, which can only be done at the LG factory or in a lab setting).
LG is working to fix the issue, by creating an updated firmware that removes the code from being accessible. Once that firmware is issued and approved, existing customers will be able to download the update over-the-air at no charge. Sprint intends to resume shipments of the LX260 Rumor to stores once devices can ship with the forthcoming update already installed.
This is the second phone in a row to need shipments halted from LG on Sprint. The LG LX160 had hardware-level issues preventing the speakerphone and caller ID display from working properly. Sprint halted shipments of the LX160 to stores until the issue could be resolved, and replaced phones for free, provided the Sprint Store had been properly informed of the silent recall.
I HATE MY LG RUMOR!!! The screen randomly blinks, the vibrate stopped, it randomly shuts off, and now, I can’t make calls or texts or anything and Sprint won’t do crap about it, and as soon as my contract is over, I am switching service.
Loved this phone for two years untill recently when it kept turning off on it’s own. I just ignored that and assumed that it was because the battery was getting old. But then last night it like spazzed out so I rebooted it then when I turned it on all my pictures, texts, contacts and everything else were gone and it had the message “SERVICE REQUIRED”. Also it always had issues with charging but I always thought it was the charger until reading these reviews.
k, what the hell..
i’m not with “spirt” it’s bell.. but it’s the same phone..
but.. i’ll send a text message, and it will send a billion duplicates to that person.. but it won’t let me recieve a text that they send back till 20-30 minutes later.. what the hell is going on?
My wife and I have had these phones since October 2008 when we got our renewal incentive. My wife has a lime green one and I have a black/blue one. For the first 10 months it was smooth sailing but my phone started doing the infamous shut-off whenever it wants to. It was absolutely the worst time for it to start acting up because we were in the middle of buying a house and I constanly missed calls from my realtor and broker. Though it is annoying, it does not do it during calls or texts, only when it sits or is in my pocket. I do keep the key lock on all the time. If it’s on the charger it won’t shut off, so if I’m at home not calling/texting, it’s plugged in.
Also, my Rumor is always trying to connect to the internet. Numerous times I have manually went to the settings and turned the data off, but it still connects. I have been in mid-text and it just starts connecting to whatever. I have seen almost $100 worth of casual data charges, yet I never use any type of data features on my phone. I call, text, and listen to some, horrible quality, music.
Now the screen on my wife’s phone keeps blacking out. She has yet to experience any random shut down but she is constanly texting and dialing blind. I’m curious if she is experiencing this because she uses the QWERTY keyboard all the time. I never use the keyboard; fingers aren’t small enough, heh. So my phone sees less screen flipping.
That’s the extent of our problems and compared to a lot of the above complaints we aren’t doing bad . . . yet. No shutting off mid call or text and our chargers and batteries are on par.
Anyways, I really didn’t want to dish out $100 for both of us to claim our phones under Asurion but it looked like it was only gonna get worse so right before I claimed I decided to research other complaints and stumbled upon a long list of dissatisfied customers.
Hearing about how everyone is recieving refurbished Rumors, or new ones that eventually act up again, I decided to hold of on sending Asurion my $100 just to go full circle. It also looks like everyone is getting nowhere with calling LG or Sprint and I really don’t want to spend hours on my phone trying to get past a road block (that’s if my phone stays on that long).
I’m a 3 year Sprint customer who has never had a late payment or issue with Sprint. I get a 23% discount on my bill through my employer so that is keeping me from wanting to ditch my provider, plus I honestly haven’t had any issues with their service and my phone never loses reception . . . when its on.
I’ve come to the conclusion that LG made a crappy phone and is too proud or ashamed to admit it, and neither LG or Sprint can afford to address the mass amount of people that jumped into the cheap and appealing phone. This will be our first and last LG. When we get our $8,000 tax credit, we will just dish out the money to upgrade to a well recieved phone. If our phones totally crap out by then, we will just see if Sprint will reactivated our old Sanyo Katanas, which were still rocking after 2 years of abuse.
We’ll see . . .
Oh goodness, my phone broke today. It won’t charge no more even if i put it in different positions.
My rumor has so many problems! I have had about 15 replacements in under a year! First the screen went completely white…next, the keyboard stopped working….after that my buttons didnt work…..i lost track of all the problems after that. It is crazy! and now the sprint store is telling me that they wont give another replacement. I have never dropped my phone and this is what i get?!?!?
my phone is 1 years old and my phone will not charge and now i have a dead phone in my case npw what if i need to reach some body and i cant di it because my phones dead and that makes me so angry, now this has been goin on sine 2 or 3 months and its having a hard time charging and i need to do things that i have to do with my phone, now can soemone tell me what to do do i need to swicth my phone or my charger
THIS PHONE IS A FUCKIN PIECE OF SHIT SORRY FOR THE PROFANITY BUT IM PISSED
Had my LG Rumor 2 for 2 months and it calls on its own and the Blue Tooth quits working . And now won’t work at all any more!
I have three of these POS phones. One keyborad no longer works & the screen goes kablooey (this one also shuts itself off at random), one charging port has recently died (this phone also had tons of issues that eventually required a new battery to purchased for no apparent reason), and the third one (mine) has been treated gently but often has to be reset. I contacted Sprint to see what options there were—–NONE. But you are elegible for an upgrade…blah blah blah. Might be worth it to pay the termination fee for four lines and get out from under this crappy company, crayyp customer service, and crappy products.
I bought a rumor 2 with the whole extend your contract for 2 year deal….. well what a deal after less than 6months my rumor 2 is not working. The screen freezes, you cannot slide the phone because the images were distorted, and now that i have become familiar with the menu inside and out i can take 10 minutes to try to send a text message. what a pos! and everywhere wants to charge e to replace it !!!!! lg is a scam and so is sprint for selling a pos product! My family is selling their shares and we are cancelling our contracts from both sprint and nextel since they are just con artists with bad products… no integrity what so ever!
i had the lg rumour, and im just wondering, if anybody else had a problem with the terrible quality of the chargers? i went through 3 chargers (it came with 2 1 home charger and 1 car charger which could also be used as a home one) and i had to purchase another one after because the part where the charger plugs into the phone broke inside of the phone. and no i dont throw it around or anything stupid when it charges. just curious if anybody else had the same problem?
Same problems here in Canada. After two weeks the phone would shut off randomly. Then it would shut off in the middle of texting. After three weeks the screen went white with thin horizontal lines showing. It also had a small black mark at the bottom of the screen. Brought the phone back to the Best Buy store where it was purchased and told them about the problems. I was told by some little condesending piss ass department manager that the phone was dropped and that’s what caused the black mark on the screen and because of that he couldn’t exchange or refund me. The phone was not dropped. The black mark which he called a bleeding screen was the last of many other issues with the phone. Called LG and I was told that I have to call my prvider which is Virgin Mobile. Did that and Virgin said that they will send the phone to LG for evaluation. After reading all the complaints on this site and so many other sites I know that LG will not do anything. My fight is with BestBuy. They sold the phone and after only three weeks I feel that they have the duty to make it right. Not wanting to deal with the cell phone department manager anymore I went to the store manager and complained about the way his staff was handling this problem. Still awaiting to hear from the store manager who said he’ll do something. This BestBuy is in Quebec and if nothing is done they will definatly loose me and as many people I could spread this to as a customer. Paid $100 for this LG Rumor and it’s now useless. Right now it’s not the money that’s bugging me, it’s the principal that this store does not stand behind the products they sell!
Wow this phone is horrible i hate it my phone was charging and all of a sudden it said error ans somethiung else idk wht but plz help!!
Woke up this morning to no alarm. The phone will ring, but the alarms will not work!! I know its only a matter of time before I have more issues with this phone.
I’m on my fourth rumor in about a hear. I keep having the same problems, either with the phone randomly turning off about every 5 minutes or the keyboard not working again. I’m about to be on my 5th because the keyboard has, once again, stopped working. I take good care of my phones and there’s absolutely no reason for this to keep happening. I also think it’s awful that I keep having the same problems again and again and Sprint offers to order me a new one of the phone… they’re already giving out the Rumor 2 practically for free, yet they keep giving me this one and saying “if you have any further problems bring it in and we’ll check up on it.” This time when I go in I’m giving them a piece of my mind… there’s no reason to have 5 of the same phone in a year when I’m paying so much for their awful plans anyway.
Hey if anybody knows how to save ringtones on the Rumor, hit me up. Like I got the file on my computer and I got the cord and the memory card but it wont let me save stuff to the phone, just the memory card. Hit me back if u know anything, my email is Kingkevan92@yahoo.com .
Im thinking of asking my mom 4 a new phone. This phone sucks d**k.
Haha, I Have An LG Rumor, And Yeah, I’ve Been Having Glitches. If I Get A Lot Of Texts At The Same Time My Phone Just Turns Off. And Once I Turned It Back On And The Screen Was All White. So I Just Took Off The Battery And Charged It. The Rumor Really Sucks, I Already Had 7 LG Rumors.
I was using my LG Rumor today and then the screen went all white on me with two black spots on it and i never dropped it in my life. I’m thinking about getting the LG Rumor 2 maybe it will be a bit better then the LG rumor its self.
ok-i got this phone less than 3 weeks ago, on virgin mobile, and its not working anymore, either. i have had lg phones for 3+ years, and this is the only one ive had problems with.
when i turn it on, it says hello on the screen, as usual, but wont do anything past that. it falls asleep too, so that shows that it still has some working components. i am just mad because i had written about 3 chapters in their notepad tool, because i am a writer. i thought it was a marvolus phone until this happened. i hope they fix this, and give us all new replacements, a new phone worth the same, or our money back-we deserve it, am i right?
and ive had the rumor2, it has the same problems… dont get it!
my lg rumor shut down itself 30 times a day. i am missing important calls. spring tell me to fix it on my own cost for their problem. what a joke, i have to live with it for now. can’t wait for my contract to expire, just a few months. byebye spring!
i try to turn on mine but the scrren is white and nothing happens. when it does work though the image is either fuzzy or just flipped upside down. im not sure what to do with it.
mine will turn off randomly when ever im in the middle of a text message or just randomly when its on my table or in my pocket. does this happen to anyone else??
Aleigha– mine does that ALL the time, once in about a minute it shut off 5 TIMES. It is very aggravating and there is no pattern to it its totally random.
I was having trouble charging all 3 phone. Then my son was looking at the battery and all 3 have hair line cracks in the same place. So they are not holding a charge. I am going to take all 3 to have the batteried replaced. I hope it helps.
well yesterday i dropped my rumor in water and it worked for like 5seconds now everytime i turn it on the screen is either up-side-down or backwards i dried it off and everything ,nor only that the full keyboard sucks!!!!it is so slow at typing and barly works even the first day i got it and i have had it abt 4 mounths now.any help??!!
My rumor lg broke on me. I barely drop it then all of a sudden the screen started flashing and then it went to a white screen. I can’t tell who’s calling me. I don’t know when I have a miss call and I don’t have insurance on it so I down graded to a sprint katana that I’ve got for maybe a 5 to 6 months now which I really regret but at this time I have to down grade sighs. My contract will be over in June of 2010. Is there a way to fix my rumor?
yea i have the LG Rumor 2 and today the screen started to go crazy. i thought i was hallucinating or something but the screen becomes gray and theres static lines and it freezes. Just started doin that today. Its been fine thus far. I am in need of a new, better phone. I hate this phone.
I have had my Rumour 2 for 3 months. The company, after reading all this, must know of a major issue. My battery is fully charged but it started doing strange things, like when I opened it the screen didn’t change and the internet froze. Then the phone went completely dead. It will not do anything. The phone company doesn’t answer it’s e-mails.
What bugs me is that this is an issue they have known about for a long time and they are still selling the phones. Anyone for a class action suit? I just spent over $100.00 on a worthless phone.
The screen is too small as well. Virgin Mobile has them on sale.
I contacted the NH Attorney General of NH and the FCC today. I want to sue these people.
My phone is completely blank except Grey screen and CHARGING on it. It does say when battery is fully charged. So I have a $129.99 battery charger.
I was told by at least 3 people today (I have their names and ID numbers) That Virgin Mobile was aware of this issue and made a conscious decision to keep these fundamentally flawed phones on the market. They are STILL being sold in Best Buy, many other places and on line by Virgin Mobile at a cut-rate of $99.99. I had sent them 5 e-mails and they responded to none.
The manager indicated that they would send me another Rumour 2, which is already flawed and will not last, but they will NOT send me a phone of comparable value. I think I will probably get one of your old phones. I asked to pay the difference, if any, and he said no.
This smells class action to me as they admitted the product was defective and are going to continue to sell the piece of junk and send there customers, if within the 3 months, the same piece of junk back to them. Just someone else’s. Any lawyers want money from LG, Sprint and Virgin Mobile?
Wow i feel really lucky then. I had my LG Rumor for a year and a half and not a thing wrong with it. It was a freebie too. I used to have the LG150, but when it was re called, Virgin sent me the rumor. My hubby has one too and he has no issues with it at all.
This piece of junk is really annoying. im in the middle of a coversation on this phone, and it decides to turn off! i would charge it for the whole night and in the morning, i try to turn it on. it decides to sleep late and then, i got out with no phone. for my own good, im going to get another contract.sprint sucks.
I got the phone for Christmas. It turns off randomly and now it won’t even turn on. I had it charger last night and it wigged out when I tried notepad. All night the screen said “Hello”
It’s been a nice phone but now I don’t know…
I HAVE NO IDEA OF WHAT HAPPENS TO MY LG RUMOR 2 PHONE I WAS SLEEPING LISTENING TO MUSIC AND WHEN I WOKE UP THE SCREEN WAS ALL BLACK BUT THE PHONE KEYBOARD STILL LIGHTED UP AND I COULD STILL MAKE PHONE CALLS,BUT WITHOUT SEEN NOTHING ON THE SCREEN, I HAD GONE TO THE BEACH A DAY BEFORE, AND SOME SAND GOT IN IT BUT IT STILL FUNCTIONED UNTIL THE NEXT DAY IT DIDNT WORKED AT ALL, THE PROBLEM IS THAT I DONT HAVE INSURANCE IN IT I DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO.. PLEASE CONTACT ME IF YOUR PHONE SEEMS TO HAVE THE SAMETHING AS MINE AND IF ANY OF YOU DID SOMETHING TO SOLVE THIS PRBOBLEM, PLEASE CONTACT ME AT TCORAYMA@YAHOO.COM….
NOW I DONT RECOMEND SPRINT SERVICES TO ANYONE, SPRINT IS THE MOST EXPENSIVE ONE, BUT ALL OF ITS PHONES SUCKS..
Sometimes removing the battery and waiting a couple of minutes to place it back in will reset things. Try that. If that doesn’t do it, may I recommend a sturdy hammer to fix it? đŸ™‚
I have had my rumor for prbably 2 -3 years this is my second one, i have had to(multiole times) get it fixed. currently it has a major issue, such as the screen goes white, or black, and no matter what i push or don’t push it will remain on the screen. it wont let me make phone calls when the screen goes blank. Also when i do make calls it will distort the voice of the other person or hang up on them. these inconveniounces where annoying at first but in the past week my rumor has been turning its self off on the drop of a dime for no reason. i have reset it so that it only has the factory defualt and its still acting up. i dont want to get a new one because it will cost $90, an my contract is up. also we will be switching plans in aug-september, we dont yet know if we will tay with sprint or switch to virizen. so that eliminates the possiblitity of geting a new sprint phone.
please help
i hate this phone, it seems like every one who has had one understands my pain, i dont do anything with my rumor,for example all i do is text and make phone calls NOT HARD i didn’t buy this stupid phone so all i could do is the same stuff a 12 dollar phone could do! some one needs to sue sprint, and LG, this is rediculas!!!!!!!
i hate this phone…i have the LG UX260 FROM US CELLULAR…HAD IT SINCE JUNE 6TH 2009 ND AFTER ABOUT A MONTH I HAD IT…THE CHARGER PORT WAS JACKED…IT GOES ON AND OFF REPEATEDLY…THE SCREEN KEEPS GOING BLACK AND IT FREEZES UP ON ME…{{I RAP}} LOLz BUT YEAH iiHATE THiiS DUMM PHONE LUKN @ IT NOW…THIS PROBLEM HAPPENS LIKE EVERY THREE MONTHS…iWANT THE SAMSUNG MESSAGER TOUCH {{BLUE((OR BLAKC AS LONG AS I GET RID OF THIS TRASH)}} FROM US CELLULAR…HATE HATE HATE HATE THIS PHONE BUT DEEP DOWN {{LLLOOOOVVVEEEE IIITTTT}} ANYWAYS,,,YEAH SOMETHIMES IT CAN BE A GOODYY BUT HAAATTEEE IITTT ….HEY!! I LOVE IT TOO
well my phone has gotten worse it doesnt even hold a charge now!!! gar im going to sprint to get my phone fixed! im tired of this!! IM GOING TO FIGHT! no one should have to pay $90 to get it fixed
Ugh this is the second battery and sometimes this one does not hold a charge either. I cannot believe how many car chargers I have gone thru this phone is a charger killer. Now when I have the slide open to text, the message button does not work half the time.
BATTERY ISSUE take a look at your battery very close. All 3 of mine had a hire line crack.
battery has hair line cracks
JLM- i ended up getting a new one, the LG 2 and its been working fine, but my old one i sent in and they ended up sending it back and it hasent shut off again like that….. maybe that would work for you???
My daughter was texting her friend on my phone . And my phone had the automatic lock on it . When it locked , i tried to unlock it but , it refused to . Until I relized that the back button would not work . I was highly frustrated because my husband bought this phone brand new . Then moments later the talk button woulden’t work . I wouldn’t recommend this phone to anyone .
Oh im sorry I didn’t mentionthe phone , it’s an LG 2 .
ive had my rumor for a couple of months now and the charger alwayz fckin slipz. i connect d charger and it makez a lil sound for a while den goez away
i got a call this morning and tried pushing talk on my lg rumor 2; nothing happened. i tried pushing the dash button two spaces up from talk and the ok button, still nothing. i couldn’t txt, push any of the buttons. i used my brother’s phone to contact sprint. she suggested that i can’t push any of the buttons, i hadn’t tried before she said something. she said i have to take it to a service place, she gave me the address, phone, and ticket number 1234594020058354107 and said that if there was no insurance they would charge to fix it.
my mother is mad at me because it is her phone and she thinks i broke it. i had just used it to make a call last night around 930 where i pushed the talk button and it worked. i don’t know if they have insurance but i don’t want them to have to pay the repair.
is this one of the issues that sprint/lg are aware of or is this something different?
help christopher price.
My entire household (3 people) is experiencing problems with the Rumor LG phone. They are each approx. a year old. My LG Rumor is no longer transmitting my voice during calls – meaning, the person I call can not hear me! My husband’s LG Rumor screen is no longer showing a clear image, it is a scattered and skewed digital blur and finally my daughter’s phone is unable to retain a charge. Each of our phones randomly “shut off” when we slide from the alpha keys to the normal phone configuration. I am surprised that there is no recall on these phones. We are so frustrated, that we are seriously considering leaving Sprint service and changing providers.