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Tesla vs Samsung Galaxy S21 issues

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A couple times a day my Galaxy S21 says it has no SIM card and no signal at all. It tends to happen when I am in my car. In other words my car tend to trigger my phone to completely loose all network with verizon. Is anyone else having this issue?
 
I have dropped the phone many times - in an outer box defender case. I am not positive it is the car/phone interaction but I think it is. There are a lot of known issues with G21 & Tesla interactions. I often get text messages and my tesla says they are from some random contact in my phone - completely incorrect. About once a week I get in my car using only my phone as the key - which I always do - and the car say no phone is connected. I cannot make any calls from the car - but it let me "steal it" with my phone!
 
Might be a timing coincidence with being in the car, but I had to replace my S21 last year because of this SIM card issue. Signal / service kept dropping. Went to Verizon and they replaced the phone. We tried a new SIM card as well with no luck. Phone just bricked itself basically.

Apps would work on Wifi, but if I was relying on 4G / 5G service it was a no-go.

I would go to your provider and explain the issue, if it was anything like my problem, it's the actual phone, not the car. Good luck!
 
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bwbrs that is what Verizon said. Next time it happens I am going to "forget" my phone on the Tesla. Also not sure if I mentioned it but my Tesla also cannot find my phone anymore - I tried everything except deleting my phone from the Tesla. Telsa cannot make calls or answer calls wen I am in it - but it works as me key. This started at exactly the same time my phone had issues - that and it pretty much only happening in my car seem to point towards car/phone interactions as a trigger.
 
I would erase your phone and reinstall the OS cleanly - restore as little as possible from backup (if nothing else, definitely avoid apps and their associated data) . If you continue to have problems? Well... I would draw a logical conclusion, your phone's hardware is failing. Dropping the device in or out of an Otterbox isn't going to prevent the sensitive cellular antennas (one on each side of your phone, right against the case) from being jarred/damaged after awhile.
 
Aaannndd.. Just to be weird here. I'm a EE; and I have a bit of a background in reliability engineering.

There is this thing called a, "FIT", which stands for Failures in Time. The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) is 1e9/FIT.

The FIT for a simple component like a resistor is typically considered to be 1 FIT. So, if one has a circuit with one and only one resistor in it, that circuit can be expected to live a billion hours. If one has a circuit with 500 resistors on it, then the MTBF = 1E9/500, or 2e6 hours.

So, simple ICs with, say, six pins have FITs around 10. Complex ICs with a 100 BGA pins are around 200 or so. A circuit board is considered to have a FIT of 1. A hot transistor (as compared to a cold one) might have a FIT of 100. Batteries have FITs, too; so do connectors.

In general, FITs for a component tend to trend with the number of connections on a component and how hot it gets. Got an Intel CPU with 500 pins on the bottom: That guy will have a Large FIT, no joke.

So, say one has a circuit board with, say, 200 or 300 components on it. The overall board would then have a FIT of around 1500. An entire cell phone? I'm guessing, but the FIT is probably 5,000 for the whole thing.

So, suppose one has a Samsung S21 with a FIT of 5,000. One would expect it to last 1e9/5e3 = 200e3 hours. Well, there's 8,760 hours per year, so that phone would probably last 200e3/8.76e3 = 22.8 years.

That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Well, there's a couple more fun things.

First, all of the above is about probabilities. Once one gets past the infant mortality of early failures (like, got a case of light bulbs, start plugging them in, and, sure and begorrah, one of those suckers is going to blow out as one plugs it in. It happens.), the failures after that tend to be random and Poisson distributed. Which basically means that the failures show up at random and aren't particularly correlated. Until one ones into wearout issues; that's more of a problem with, say, batteries and connectors than ICs and resistors, but those latter devices got wearout, too.

So, suppose Samsung makes 10,000,000 cell phones. Say each one has a FIT of 5000. What's the MTBF across the population of all the cell phones?

Glad you asked. 1e9/(10,000,000 x 5000) = 0.2 hours between failures, on average, across that whole population. Whee.

So, one individual may have a cell phone that lasts for years without any trouble, plus or minus a dead battery. The other fellow in the mid-sized town gets a dead cell phone after a year; another guy, after two. This is Why Warranties.

It is possible to use high-quality, NASA-grade components with low FIT rates when one builds a bit of electronics.. I'm doubled over laughing, now: Samsung and all their buddies figure that a phone is going to last 5 years, tops, so it's bottom-of-the-grade-bucket parts for you, natch.

So, I'm chugging around, myself, with an iPhone 12, just about as old as that S21, and, yep, no problems. But another gonzo with another i12 may very well have had a problem; with the sheer numbers of these phones out there, it's a gimmie that on any given day, a number of these phones, from whomever, will be failing. (Although, if the manufacturer sticks real crud in there, yeah, it'll be a very unreliable phone.) And now you know why Consumers Reports publishes reliability numbers.

So, here we are on a forum. People with problems come forth (self selecting, what?) to complain about the failure on their particular phone. Or car. So, I'm not surprised that the OP has a problem with his/her phone; it's a gimmie that, given the sheer number of phones out there and the characteristics of FIT rates, there will be phones that fail like that. That's not a maybe, that's for sure. Sucks to be the party with the bad phone, but, well, that's life.

Now, since I mentioned NASA.. As one might be aware, NASA's in the habit of sending space probes for long travel times across the solar system, and those probes have serious amounts of high grade electronics. And what with normal (and even special!) manufacturing processes, FIT rates will catch up with one. So, how do the Voyagers and Cassinis of NASA keep on working anyway?

The answer is: Redundancy. Say one has not one, but two parallel circuits, either one of which can do the job, and they're wired in parallel, so both have to fail before the function goes away. Remember how I said that the MTBF is 1e9/(Sum of FITs)? For two redundant circuits, the MBTF is 1e9*1e9/(Sum of FITs of both circuits). If it was triply redundant, it would be 1e9*1e9*1e9/(Sum of all three circuits' FITs). Ah. 1e18 hours/(a couple of hundred) and one has a bit of hardware that's going to last a long, long time. NASA's satellites are marvels of redundant engineering and are designed to have lots of little redundant bits everywhere.

If cell phones were built to those standards, we'd be handing them on to our great-great grandchildren. That, and the loan one had to take out to get the blame thing built, and the cart to haul the big, heavy thing around. Yeah, reliability is a wonderful thing, but only in its place.
 
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