Samsung Ativ S owners beware of GDR3!

I’m having a serious problem with my Samsung Ativ S, so I binged it and it appears that it is wide-spread (as wide-spread as anything-Ativ could be that is).

There appear to be at least two serious deep bugs in GDR3 (again AFAIK only applicable to this particular handset):

The first is storage related. Yes GDR3 finally allows us to clean the temporary files storage but not the System storage.  An Ativ S with GDR3 begins to accumulate data in the System folder for which there is no option to clean (And third-party apps can’t help there either). Many users report a 7GB size of their System folder, mine had reached 10 whole GigaBytes!.  Needless to say everytime I wanted to install a large game I was confronted with the “storage limit reached” error.

As there is no way to clean the System storage a hard reset is the only solution.

All smiles? Not really.

Cause then the second bug comes into a play and it is a nasty one.

The hard reset goes smoothly with no apparent issues. The phone boots normally, you connect to wifi, and you download the first app. The download succeeds but the installation of the app fails with error code 8007049a.   You download a second app, same story.  The phone is no longer capable of installing anything!.

I’ve searched the WDW (whole damned web) and no solution exists. Some people returned to GDR2 by flashing ROMs from xda developers. That is not ideal and potentially dangerous (and of course they lose the benefits of having the latest OS version). An official solution is required.

I had a chat with Microsoft support yesterday and they don’t know what the problem is. They suggested we address Samsung instead. Who’s fault do you think it is?   On one hand it appears to affect only the Ativ S. So it is Samsung’s fault right? But then there were no issues with the previous Windows Phone versions, GDR3 is the culprit. I personally think they are both to blame, but mostly Samsung because clearly they did not properly test their firmware under GDR3.   Lumia owners often complain that Nokia is late to release WP updates compared to Samsung BUT they (Nokia) also release a new firmware that is properly tested under the new version. Samsung is quick to release WP updates because they don’t do much in terms of firmware changes.

So if you own an Ativ S with GDR3 what should you do? Or better what you should NOT do?  DON’T perform a hard reset! Clearly. Your storage problem is nothing compared to what follows the hard reset. Wait until hopefully a new firmware with fix arrives.