Alright, please welcome me to the club. Same story here, the three most important soft keys are not working on my 1 year 1 month old Xperia Z3C. Yeah, that's right. Just after my warranty has expired.
Actually, it started bit earlier. I was having issues with the drop down menu for last few weeks. I honestly thought it happened when I accidentally dropped the phone once and the top portion hit the ground, although no damage was visible. But after reading the comments here, apparently, that's not the case, it is a BUG! And to reinforce that conclusion, now the drop down menu works perfectly fine after the last update, and the bottom 3 soft keys won't respond. So let's talk about that.
First of all I am glad that I looked for a solution online rather than taking it to the service center - who, like the most other service center guys mentioned in the thread, won't absolutely have a clue about the issue and have no idea how to deal with it, will ask me to replace the screen or some costly hardware which costs half of the phone price - and I would have happily paid since I LIKE this phone otherwise.
Second of all, I would like to thank everyone who proposed workaround solutions. Like the glove mode, third party soft key apps etc. They are quite helpful although not a permanent solution. And I am a 'developer' now (!), tried the 'show touches' and it shows the bottom 5 mm strip is insensitive to the touches. However, when tried with screen touch diagnostics, this area works perfectly fine. And on screen lock mode, again, there is no issue with the bottom portion, like many others mentioned here.
So, from all the comments above, I understand that this bug is like a cancer and it slowly eats your screen out and the phone will eventually be useless. Pretty bad news for those who have no warranty. And perhaps the craziest software bug I ever heard about. That's scary and the most irritating part is - although it is evident that this issue started showing up around an year ago, SONY is just insensitive like their mobile phone screens. It is hard to believe that the Engineer's cannot understand the issue to propose a bug fix. A piece of advice to the SONY representative here, who was kind enough to provide few comments. Please do not conclude it is not a software issue if YOUR software repair application cannot detect it. It just means that your application needs an update.
My first and of course, the last SONY mobile phone. I liked this phone and really wish if this gets fixed, but apparently it seems there is no way out. So goodbye SONY.
PS: One of my friend in Dubai asked for my feedback on another Xperia M series phone, which was offered for a surprisingly low price during a sale. Strangely, the phone had Android 5.0 not the latest version. (Well, no prize for guessing why!) I asked him to read this thread. Now he knows why he should omit SONY phones from his list. Thanks for this thread once again.
