The day before Easter Friday, I was prompted to upgrade my Samsung S3 software and I complied. The download (400MB+) and installation took a while but it eventually completed. Just when I was delighted about some new features introduced by the firmware and software upgrade such as more languages support on Samsung keyboard and Text To Speech, I soon discovered that the upgrade came with a deadly problem: every time I used the phone, I ended up with a frozen device sooner (less than a minute) or later (less than 30 minutes).
At first I thought it was just a glitch and would pass, but I was wrong. The problem persisted for a couple of days to a point that it rendered my phone useless. Out of frustration, I started investigating the problem by elimination – going through all the running processes and try to figure out which could be the culprit. I saw a process called Remote Control that I had never seen before the upgrade. On the Configuration menu, it says that the Remote Control allows the owner of the phone to remotely shutdown the phone if it’s stolen. I swiftly turned it off. Hey presto, problem fixed. And now I make sure I always kill the Remote Control app after any reboot.
Here is a message to Samsung: make sure you test your software thoroughly before releasing them.
