HTC Sensation Restart Loop

Problem:

My phone is a 2 year-old HTC Sensation that has been pretty reliable, which is great.  However, I started having troubles where the phone would shut off randomly.  Not the worst thing in the world, but when I tried to power it back up, it would get all the way to the home screen and then the screen would go black like it had fallen to sleep.  However, it had shut itself off instead which led to an infinite boot loop.

Solution:

My temporary solution was to perform a battery pull, which sometimes fixed the problem for a while.  Unfortunately, it would return at odd intervals.  I got pretty fed up with this, so I started looking around online for help.  I was surprised that it was apparently a battery issue, but it resolved my problem, so I have no complaints.  (For the record, I had bought new aftermarket batteries recently because my stock one was wearing out, but I do not think this had anything to do with it.  The Anker batteries are of good quality.)

The real problem was a battery contacts/voltage issue.  Apparently if the battery voltage is too low, the phone will shutdown to protect itself.  This is what leads to the infinite loop I was stuck in.  Two fields of thought exist on how to remedy this and I tried both.  The most successful was cleaning the contacts.  I used some sandpaper, but anything should work.  You just want to scrape the surface of the phone's contacts to ensure that no residual contaminants exist there.  The second option is to try to put a small piece of paper on the top side of the battery that will force it into the contacts more thoroughly.  This doesn't really help on the Sensation because of the steps built into the battery, but I did it just to be careful.

Musings:

While I know that this blog barely even registers on the internet, I apologize for being gone for so long.  I was hoping to keep up a post every few weeks, but even that is frighteningly busy when you're frighteningly busy.  All my own fault, but it's not like that makes things easier.

So my phone is getting to about the 2-year mark where phones start to break down.  Everyone knows this point, it's when the device that has had 99.999% reliability drops down to 95%.  It might not sound like much, but 1/20 tries being unsuccessful can be pretty devastating to sanity.  Here is a list of the problems encountered so far:

Could not enter new address into browser, had to restart phone.
Could not exit phone call because end call button wouldn't work.  Finally worked on ~10th try.
Power button works intermittently to wake up phone.
SD card fails to reinitialize, had to restart phone.
Phone does not successfully change between mobile data and wifi, have to restart phone.

Now, I understand that phones are complex devices.  You have hardware, Android base operating system, HTC's touch-ups, and carrier add-ons.  The fact that phones are so reliable with all of these layers is pretty impressive from an engineering perspective to me.  Unfortunately, I'm just as annoying and single-minded as any other consumer when I'm a consumer.  Honestly, I don't care about having lots of upscale phone features as long as it can text/call/basic web surf in 100% reliability.  And I guess that's why people upgrade their phones every few years.

I can handle these issues if the phone can still do the "basic" functions I outlined above.  However, the infinite reboot cycle was really driving me nuts.  However, phones are pricey and I love my phone, so I wanted to keep it a little longer.  The Sensation really was a sweet spot in phone development, one of the first dual-core phones.  Newer phones blow it out of the water, but right now I'm keeping it around as a challenge to see how long it can last.  It feels great to get my money's worth out of electronic devices since so often they mysteriously break and you curse at yourself for trusting in another product with bad quality control.