I've had a problem on a couple occasions now where my touchscreen has gone into power-save mode and the power button fails to bring it back, effectively turning my phone into a brick. The first time this happened while I was making a call, which was immensely frustrating, but managed to correct itself when the call finally ended. The second just happened this morning and the only way I could figure out how to return my phone to a working state was to remove the battery. I've barely had this phone for a month, and other than this issue I absolutely love it. My questions for the community are: has anyone else encountered this problem? Is it a known issue, and are there fixes or workarounds? Is there a more convenient way to power off my phone than to remove the battery if this happens again?
Meanwhile, here's what happened on each of the occasions described above, but in greater detail:
The First Encounter
I made a phone call to a friend, and as soon as I dialed out the phone went into power-save mode and the screen turned off. My friend wasn't available and I got voice mail. I left my message and then tried to shake my phone to wake up the screen so I could hang up. That didn't work, so I tried to hit the power button to turn the screen on. That didn't work either. For a couple minutes I tried pressing the power button repeatedly, holding it down, etc., all while the voice mail system on the line informed me I could press 1 to accept my message or whatever. Nothing worked. Eventually the remote voicemail system interpreted my repeated failure to respond as an error and disconnected the call. Once that happened my phone started working again (the power button turned on the screen). The scary part is that all the while that I couldn't interact with my phone, the call was connected and there was nothing I could do to disconnect it. Had this been an expensive toll call it might have been very upsetting, but as it turned out it was little more than a troubling inconvenience.
The Second Encounter
This morning I checked my mail when I got up and followed a link in a message about a sale at REI (i.e., major retailer, not spam). The browser opened but the page was slow to load, so I set my phone down and diverted my attention elsewhere momentarily. When I came back about 15 minutes later my phone was asleep and the soft glowing indicator on the front was pulsing to inform me that I had received a new text or email. However, I couldn't turn the screen back on. No amount of pressing or holding the power button could bring it back to life or power it off. I got the feeling some process on the phone had locked the screen out and the only way to get it back would be to kill that process, kind of like how ending the phone call had worked before. But without the screen to interact with the phone, all I have are the power button and volume buttons. If there's some secret handshake I can do with those three buttons to wake up the phone or force it to power down I don't know what it is, and I couldn't figure it out. I did a quick web search from my computer to see how to "reset" the phone, but even the hard reset procedure I found requires going through the settings menu. Yikes!
So, I don't have the facial recognition thing turned on, and I haven't overloaded my phone with lots of apps or obscure stuff or anything. I've only had it a few weeks and everything I've installed is a top download on the Android marketplace (like Any.DO, UK & World News, etc.). In any case, even if this problem could be traced to some troubled app, I would hope that there's a better way to un-brick my phone than to take apart my multi-part Otter case, pry the back off the phone and remove the battery.
Ideas?
Thanks!
Chip.
@speleofool Thanks for posting and congratulations on the new device! The Nexus is a great phone! Regarding your issue about waking up, this is very odd for a new device. I did some research and it seems this is not a known issue with the phone. I would recommend doing the following steps:
Settings>Apps>Choose all Apps>choose System UI>clear data>force stop.
This will stop your screen from freezing and wake up when it should. I would make it a practice to clear data from apps that give you trouble. I hoped this helps. Thanks.
SammuelP_VZW
VZW Support
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Do you have light flow installed?
If so make sure you don't have the "other led" box checked.
With phone locked up can't get to settings to clear apps.
Sorry about the confusion MtBill. If your phone is locked up, you'll need to pull the battery http://bit.ly/PlMmUT and reboot the phone in order to get into the settings Sammuel mentioned. If you continue to have trouble, then the next best step would be a master reset http://bit.ly/swCYZF to clear all the corrupt information from your phone.
Thank you
JenniferH_VZW
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