This post is part of a series of posts that I am currently writing about the bugs that I have found in my Philips TV since I bought it in January 2016
So after having experienced my first bug on my TV and having installed my first software update from Philips, I was thinking that it might be a good TV after all.
But that feeling didn’t last long and the update was only newly installed when I encountered two new interesting bugs in April/May.
The second bug
The second bug I saw appeared when I was using my PS3 attached via HDMI. Then this dialogue appeared
In English it is the following message
Important
The TV has detected a problem with the installed Apps and is now set to Safe Mode.
This problem might be caused by one or more Apps. Press OK to delete all Apps and to recover from Safe Mode. You can install your Apps again from the App Gallery or Google Play Store later.
Hmm. I thought, what to do know. I didn’t have any apps I had installed at this point in time, so I pressed Ok and nothing happened except for the message “Safe mode” being seen in the bottom left hand corner until we rebooted the TV manually next time.
So a bug related to… I don’t really know what it was related to. At this point it only displayed the start menu on the PS3, so I wasn’t doing anything that required anything special from the TV except just display the signal streamed through the HDMI cable..
The third bug
The third bug I experienced was a more critical bug, which got me a little more worried. Twice within 2 hours one night the screen suddenly looked like this
When this happened the TV stopped responding to the remote control, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to get it back into a useful mode. I couldn’t even turn off the TV.
So the only solution was to unplug the power and reboot (I never thought I would have to reboot a TV as often as I have rebooted this TV).
This third bug is as the previous bugs the result of me doing nothing actively… So it is somehow related to a background process or a fault in the app displaying flow TV.
The solution
I approached the support once more, and the answer at this point was a reinstall of the TV. Wow, I thought, I had just updated the TV and now I was told to reinstall the TV, what kind of problem solving are we doing here.
I challenged this because it made no sense, and it just seemed like a way to stall me and make me waste my time. I asked the question “Is the reason for the reinstallation due to fixing some known issues or is it just a way of saying. We have know idea what is going on and let’s just try this and hope it fixes everything.
The follow-up answer
Then I got a the craziest response
Problemet lyder ikke til at det skyldes tv'et da vi ikke har noget fejlbesked der hedder Sikker tilstand, eller nogen sikker tilstand på tv'et. Jeg vil anbefale at du lige prøver at høre Playstation eventuelt da det kan være en fejlbesked sendt fra den.
Which loosely translates into
The error does not seem to be related to the TV, since we do not have an error message called “Safe mode” or any safe mode on the TV. I will recommend that you contact PlayStation, since it can be an error message from them.
So obviously I am in contact with a supporter that does not know their own TV well enough to know the error messages that it might display, and the option to reinstall seemed like an option picked from some list of “How to get rid of the customers”
I had to send him the following link http://philips-tvconsumercare.kxondemand.com/portal/en/Faq/All/4477 letting him know that it is indeed an error coming from the TV and not my PlayStation.
The support never responded to this issue but eventually (after I had reported two further issues) said that yet another software update was available and that I should update the TV