So I've had this phone for a few months but thanks to the mess with the US I wasn't able to get the Nougat update from ZTE's servers through the Gold's System Update. I later found a Nougat image on ZTE's support page, put it on an empty SD card and installed it from Settings>System Update. That went fine. I rebooted, did the setup, installed a few apps and everything seemed great until I tried to make a phone call. The display sits on 'Dialing...' for about 20 seconds with no ringing sound and then the call drops, followed by the signal bars going hollow and a message that I have left my Home network. After 10-20 seconds the signal meter returns to normal and I'm on my Home network again. Calling out aside, SMS works fine and 4G works fine.
Rebooting does nothing, re-seating the sim does nothing and factory resets do nothing. When I go to Phone>Settings>Call Settings>Carrier Settings>Additional Settings a pop-up says "Reading settings..." and then after about 20 seconds I get "Network or Sim card error" and the Data Roaming warning (mentioned above) appears in the Notifications bar. Just trying to get that information off of the card breaks my data connection. I called my carrier and they confirm my account is in order and everything is fine on their end. When I put the sim back into my old phone it works properly and I can make calls and browse, etc. Going to the same >Additional Settings on my old phone, it loads up without the "Network or Sim card error" message. This all seems like a very specific error, that trying to pull my connection or account information from the sim is breaking my connection and causing outgoing calls to crash. This never happened on the Gold under 6.0.1.
In case it's important, I have a 7 Mini Gold but the 7 Mini Gold page does not have an update image on it. I used the update image from the 7 Mini page. I figured the lack of an image on the Gold's support page was an oversight rather than the Gold being so different that it needs its own separate updates. I hope I didn't get that wrong.
Unless someone has some insight into fixing this as-is, right now I think I have to either rollback Nougat (except I haven't found an image of 6.0.1 yet) or install Lineage OS. I think I have all the files I need to flash Lineage, using Tulip from here and the directions found here and the image found here. All comments, even just speculation, are welcome.
Rebooting does nothing, re-seating the sim does nothing and factory resets do nothing. When I go to Phone>Settings>Call Settings>Carrier Settings>Additional Settings a pop-up says "Reading settings..." and then after about 20 seconds I get "Network or Sim card error" and the Data Roaming warning (mentioned above) appears in the Notifications bar. Just trying to get that information off of the card breaks my data connection. I called my carrier and they confirm my account is in order and everything is fine on their end. When I put the sim back into my old phone it works properly and I can make calls and browse, etc. Going to the same >Additional Settings on my old phone, it loads up without the "Network or Sim card error" message. This all seems like a very specific error, that trying to pull my connection or account information from the sim is breaking my connection and causing outgoing calls to crash. This never happened on the Gold under 6.0.1.
In case it's important, I have a 7 Mini Gold but the 7 Mini Gold page does not have an update image on it. I used the update image from the 7 Mini page. I figured the lack of an image on the Gold's support page was an oversight rather than the Gold being so different that it needs its own separate updates. I hope I didn't get that wrong.
Unless someone has some insight into fixing this as-is, right now I think I have to either rollback Nougat (except I haven't found an image of 6.0.1 yet) or install Lineage OS. I think I have all the files I need to flash Lineage, using Tulip from here and the directions found here and the image found here. All comments, even just speculation, are welcome.
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