Forma needs force reset after charging

[narual]

This is weird. Every time I leave my forma on the charger for more than a couple hours, the battery percentage on the screen freezes at 96 or 97%, and the device is completely unresponsive until I hold the power button in for 15-30 seconds, I haven’t timed it, but long enough that the white light starts flashing and it takes a long time to boot up. The battery is usually 100% once it finally boots up, so it must finish charging after it fills up.

Has anyone run into it?

Doesn’t matter whether I’m reading a side loaded book or one out of the kobo store, if that could be an indicator.

I mostly load through Dropbox rather than calibre now. I don’t trust the microusb slot not to break if I’m plugging and unplugging things - I use a magnetic charger (a little nub that lives in the microusb slot and connects to a cable via a magnet - no strain and the cord won’t get twisted up if reading while charging.

[desterly]

Both my wife and I have a Forma and hers does the exact same thing. We are pretty sure in her case it's the smart cover as when we take it out of the cover it doesn't lock up after charging (Official Kobo cover). I have no idea why the cover would cause that except if it has something to do with the magnet.

Mine doesn't have that issue but I do have frequent lockup's on some of my books. Usually opening them in Calibre and running the epub check fixes those.

[John F]

I noticed on my Forma, once it reaches 100%, there are a lot of flashes for a short period of time.

[hobnail]

Try powering it off before you start charging it, or after you start charging it if it powers up when you plug it in. I try to remember to do that with mine whenever I'm going to leave it charging unattended. Not because of your problem but I figure it might help clear out any "crud" in memory.

[narual]

I tried resetting it yesterday on the theory that maybe somehow this and the extreme slowness were related to the large number of books I had loaded. Now there are 6 books from Dropbox plus maybe 30 or so I’ve purchased from the kobo store… I’m reading with it plugged in… and it froze up again.

I threw out my magnet cover because it seemed to cause problems, even though I have that setting disabled. (And it kept sticking to my Damascus steel wedding ring.)

i suppose it could be related to the magnet charger, but if so, this may be my last kobo, at least until they add wireless charging and/or a sturdy USB-C connector. Every single kobo I’ve had has wound up with a broken micro usb connector, resulting in a perfectly good ereader getting trashed because of one stupid flimsy point of failure. Using this magnet thing is the only thing keeping this one from breaking as well. Last time I took it out to use a data transfer cable, I had to use a toothpick to bend something inside the port to get it plugged back in.

[Aleron Ives]

FWIW, current Kobo models all use USB-C now.

[narual]

Did a full factory reset and manually updated the firmware to the release that added Dropbox support since I use that a lot.

So far, so good… except the dictionary is busted. All of them show no results. Well, all the ones I’ve tried — English French German Spanish Portuguese Italian and several of the x to y translation dictionaries.

But it’s MUCH more responsive, and suddenly the Wi-Fi is working better than it ever has - before this I would get just the dot at the base of the Wi-Fi symbol even if the forma was sitting on top of an access point, now it’s at full even for some neighbors who haven’t learned that making your network run at max power to add distance only helps if the devices connecting to it are capable of blasting as loudly.
Not that it makes a huge difference given how small most ebooks are, but it’s made the connection more reliable, too.

[Aleron Ives]

Did you sync since the reset? Dictionaries are erased when you reset, and you must sync at least once to download them again, even if you use sideload mode.

[narual]

The damned thing updated the firmware on me the first time I left Wi-Fi on overnight. Now it’s slow as hell again and keeps highlighting content if I happen to touch the screen (which it was doing previously and I don’t think I mentioned. I haven’t left it plugged in overnight yet so I don’t know if the freezing issue has returned. The dictionary is fine now though.

I did at least one sync after resetting it so it would pick up my purchases, but that didn’t fix ut (my update s out resetting was after I did that sync).

[Quoth]

Clean the screen?

I only ever download Kobo or Amazon purchases to laptop or desktop. Never to gadget.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by narual

The damned thing updated the firmware on me the first time I left Wi-Fi on overnight.

If it's important to you to avoid a firmware update, you'll have to never turn Wi-Fi on and instead sideload all your books until a new firmware that fixes the problem comes out.

[John F]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

If it's important to you to avoid a firmware update, you'll have to never turn Wi-Fi on and instead sideload all your books until a new firmware that fixes the problem comes out.

Or they could patch.

[Aleron Ives]

According to reports from some users here, the patch to avoid firmware updates doesn't actually work. Your device will update itself, anyway. The patch notes warn you of this up front, since it's impossible to test the patch until the next firmware version comes out.