Thank you for the suggestion. Yes, as soon as I unboxed & started charging, the phone updated the firmware by itself. I'll read around the clean flash instruction carefully and try it. I'll report back, so please check my update.........(pretty please?).

On a side note, I contacted the developer of "rplay" MP3 player to ask if this app lets me hear SMS and chat notifications. His response was "No, music only pauses for phone calls and not other notifications". So I wasn't sure if the problem (feature??) resides in the app or the phone. There were many posts in Android forums asking how to turn off notifications during music playback...........can't imagine one wants to miss notifications, but I guess heavy phone users don't want to be bothered by notifications all the time.