That's a serious HW issue if it's affecting so many people

It may go a little way to explaining why I haven't had a response from Nokia yet too...

I'll give it a few more days and off to the service centre I guess...

I've also noticed this, although generally while walking outside where there's background noise and motion. I haven't yet done experiments to track it down to mistuned echo cancellation or to a hardware problem.

I will be very fairly cranky if it's a hardware problem with the slider connector, as some have suggested, as my N810's touch screen failed a few weeks after the warranty ended, also possibly due to problems with this type connector. (There seemed to be many other people with similar problems... If this is a common hardware failure, it might indicate that Nokia needs to improve its handling of widespread hardware failures due to design problems.)

I've noticed the same issue, can't tell if I noticed it before the SW update or not. The call sometimes starts with a barely unaudible level, tapping the volume control once resets the voice level. My gut feeling would be that this is a sw issue as a slight tap to a control resets it to a previous level. No evidence for this though.

It seems we just need to complain like N97 users!

"The firm’s [Nokia's] online forum contains several user rants about the N97’s alleged inability to keep hold of calls. Others complain that the device’s touchscreen can be slow, unresponsive or just too darn difficult to operate.

Nokia has responded with firmware release 21.0.045 which the company promised provides “improved call reliability” and “smoother touch screen scrolling”."

They got their update yesterday: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/02..._n97_firmware/



To the Nokia Forum everyone!!

Well I have emailed Nokia, but not had a response.

Also, I did post to a thread but recieved no reply.

You can bump the thread at http://discussions.nokiausa.com/disc....id=4265#M4265 if you want.

Failing that, if I finish work early one day I'll call Nokia.

HERE IS THE FIX THAT WORKED ON 3 N900s so far:

I have had this annoying volume dropping issue ever since PR1.1 update. I was so pissed off by this that I even considered selling the phone. After reading all of the comments in this thread and a couple of others on the same topic I decided to try something very stupid in order to fix this freaking thing

Here is what I did today. I have dropped the phone several times from the height of about 5-10 inches against a wooden table covered by cloth. I made sure that it landed on different sides of the slide. Want to laugh? It worked! The volume is now rock solid on both incoming and outgoing calls. Don't know how permanent this "fix" is, but I'm extremely happy for now since the phone was simply unusable before.
What this means, at least to me, is that the nature of the issue is HW based and not SW related. This also explains relatively small numbers of comments from people experiencing volume level issue.

P.S. Obviously, your results may vary due to the barbarian nature of the fix)

Hi all!
First time posting here, but been reading around a bit
Anyhow, it looks awfully like the problem I experienced with the Nokia 5800XM. (a lot of stuff was said about this online, so you can find traces of discussions on various forums for sure.)
Turned out that the small contacts underneath the speaker were made of a really smooth material (in the first batches) and that meant that putting the phone in the pocket (nice for a MOBILE PHONE, he?), and generally applying pressure on the area of the speaker would bend them down a bit, making the contact quite random.
I don t have the N900 yet (will get it tonight), but the symptoms really look the same. Like pressing the phone on the ear would sometime make the volume really low, then changing the position would change the volume and all. Also, that would backup the story of our friend dropping the phone around, which could move things around a bit and fix the problem.
Only thing to do was to open the casing, and with some pliers, being un-bending them really carefully.
Being living in Beijing, and buying my phones on the gray market, I had to live with it, and remember to be careful. But Nokia knew about it, and people sending their phones in for repair had no troubles afterward. Seeing how easy it is to fix, it was even done on the spot in Nokia care centers, I hear.

There you go, I believe this is the issue!

I thought I had this issue when I got my phone and freaked out because I imported to Australia i.e. no warranty. But I believe - at least in my case - it's to do with the positioning of the phone on the ear. I think if I hold the phone at the wrong position against my ear the (tiny) speaker hole lines up with the ridge on my ear effectively blocking all sound from the speaker. I think I have it sussed where to hold it against my ear now.

Has anybody experience a similar issue?

Hi double,

I'm pretty sure the positioning is not the problem here... Although that thought did cross my mind too

Dan

btw - i've still not had a response from Nokia so i'm emailing them again.

Hey, danielz000!

You might want to try my method described several posts above. It worked a treat for me. Today I have fixed another two N900 phones that my friends own in exactly the same way. It's a HW issue 100%.