Treo 680 freezes when answering an incoming call?

Just after a few days of usage I was very disappointed. My brand new smartphone froze when picked up a phone call.

Symptoms

Could not connect the freeze event to any contact or other event. It was freezing randomly no matter if I was using the hardware button or touch screen to receive the call. Nothing could be done on freeze but removing the battery and do a soft reset. Tried to google for a solution and no lasting solution found. Of course Palm has nothing to say about this on their support page... After all this is a perfect phone. Users are imperfect provoking those nasty errors and freezes.

Solution no. 1 - not working for me

By desperately searching the net I found a discussion board saying that the error is provoked by the Date & Time setting set to automatically from the mobile network. Well on my unlocked  Treo did not made the magic. Freezes kept coming randomly as they did before.

Solution no. 2 - did not bother to try

Changing the sim card. Someone was writing that he asked for a new sim card from the mobile operator. For a few days he had some luck but according to his posts after a week he had to face the freeze symptom again.

Solution no. 3 - did not bother to try

Changing the phone. I saw board postings of people who asked for replacement phones even two times, and that did not change their problem.

Solution no. 4 - not working for me

I was reading about the database integrity is not okay on the phone and should be checked with a small program. Did that and believe me nothing wrong has been found on my Treo 680.

Solution no. 5 - did not bother to try

Hard reseting the device and than try to use it without installing any app. See if it freezes. I suppose Palm did that before releasing their product :) I don't have time for that.

Solution no. 6 - working for me so far since 29th december 2007 

I was reading a post about someone who has been speaking with the palm support guy. According to the post after long soft reset and hard reset sessions palm said its a data issue. In other words help yourself we cannot help you. 

Okay I had a clue... I already had some data issue with palm when putting on my contacts. I know Palm OS hates unicode characters. What if my Address Book has a few of them?

I made a hot sync, and took my computer opened Palm Desktop to check my contacts one by one. And there it was.

I had contacts with strange looking categories. Checked the categories and found a few suspect records with name END:VCARD, and others having strange characters like this √. I deleted them. Interesting to know that there was no trace of these categories on my Treo. Did a Hot Sync again  and since then I have no freezes when picking up calls on my Treo.

Conclusion

The Treo 680 gives us users the false feeling we can receive all kind of data through USB, IR, or BLUETOOTH but be careful. So far it seems to me, the characters it can handle is limited. Checking the received or imported VCARDS or CONTACT DATA might save you from a few unwanted freezes.