Have I fried my phone?

[gezh]

Hi. I inserted a metal tweezer into the USB port on my Samsung S6, to try and give the port a bit of a clear out from fluff etc, and now the phone appears to be dead, it just won't start. The battery was pretty full at the time.

OK, Yes - I know, in retrospect, that this was a pretty daft thing to do - but it's something I do regularly to the headphone socket when it won't work and always does the trick. The USB port was becoming unreliable so I thought cleaning it out may help.

So apart from confirming that I'm an idiot, does anyone know what may have happened and whether there's anything that can be done to rescue it?

 

[Hadron]

The risk with a metal tweezer is usually that you'll damage the delicate contacts and be unable to charge the phone ever again (or communicate via USB, or both, depending on which contact you damage). A soft brush or air blower is generally recommended rather than a hard probe.

Sudden, instant death is one I've not heard of, though without a circuit diagram I can't say for sure whether shorting two of the contacts could burn something out. All I can suggest is getting a strong magnifying glass and seeing whether the contacts look intact.

Was the phone switched on at the time, were there any other symptoms (heat, smells)?

 

[gezh]

As far as I can remember yes, the phone was switched on, and no, I didn't notice any other symptoms. Next time I looked at the phone it was off, but it wasn't me that switched iit off.

I suppose it's possible that my actions had nothing to do with it, and that it just went phhhh.... but that seems unlikely!

 

[joe71]

You can try and take it to a repair shop and see if they can fix it

 

[svim]

Keeping in mind there's a difference between a smartphone in sleep mode (low power state) and actually being powered off (lowest power state), the overriding issue being the power button on almost all phones is not an actual, physical switch -- even when 'powered off' there's still a trickle charge in the motherboard. If you want to power off your phone when you press the Power button it prompts a shutdown sequence of events, and conversely when you want to turn your phone back 'on' when you press the button again that just triggers a boot up sequence of events.
So there's always going to be at least some power in your phone no matter if you had it powered off or just sleeping when you were using those metal tweezers in the USB port. (... the only way to avoid that is to remove the battery and let the mobo trickle charges to drain away, which is easily doable in a phone where the battery is user-removable but with a S6 and its fixed battery will be more of an involved task) Looking up your S6 online it apparently has includes a 'daughterboard', most phones have just a single motherboard, and the USB port is in the daughterboard. The iFixit site has a nice guide on replacing it:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Samsung+Galaxy+S6+Daughterboard+Replacement/44660
In the event those tweezers did cause some internal component(s) to short out, given that may or may not be the actual problem, it might be a matter where just replacing the daughterboard will restore your S6 to working condition (the other issue being the internal storage chip resides on the motherboard, not the daughterboard, so your data should still be there.)
All this is pretty involved so unless you're comfortable doing a tear-down of your phone, take it to a local, trusted repair shop. And in the future, use a wood toothpick when you're poking around metal contacts.

 

[Fox Mulder]

The only things that should go in that connector are a proper charging/data cable, a blast of compressed air to blow out dust/lint/dirt, or maybe a shot of contact cleaner. Even a non-metallic implement stuck in there can do damage and bend or break the contacts as they are rather fragile.