How to restart phone (instead of turn off then on)?

[Paddy Landau]

Occasionally

 

[Hook]

If you hold the power button (and ignore the menu which offers you the power off option), the phone will spontaneously power off and then reboot. This is useful as it does the same thing that a battery pull used to and can clear up things when you get strange behavior.

Don't know if that is what you have been doing by accident, but it is the way to make a spontaneous reboot happen without root.

 

[Omar Days]

keep holding down the power button even when the the option to power off your device pops up, keep holding it. It should turn off, then let go of the button and it'll re-start.

 

[Omar Days]

If you hold the power button (and ignore the menu which offers you the power off option), the phone will spontaneously power off and then reboot. This is useful as it does the same thing that a battery pull used to and can clear up things when you get strange behavior.

Don't know if that is what you have been doing by accident, but it is the way to make a spontaneous reboot happen without root.

Ninja'd!

 

[Paddy Landau]

If you hold the power button

 

[Hook]

I don't do this unless the phone is non-responsive, because it doesn't allow the Linux kernel to shut down cleanly, and potentially could allow data corruption.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this is true or not, but it would surprise me. A Windows computer, yes, but I would expect a Linux kernel to shut down with an auto-boot flag more gracefully and would think it's one of the reasons it takes some time. And I've never had any detrimental effects of this (nor actual physical battery pulls on my Nexus One, though there I could see this being a problem).

I'm wondering if you have any documentation on this? Not saying you are wrong (or that your caution isn't valid), just curious and would like to learn more.

I go through enough reboots playing with ROMs and kernels that I rarely have to do it, but when things go wonky (bad signal where it should be good, screen lag), it is a sure-fire method to get things back on track in my experience.

 

[Paddy Landau]

As far as I have always understood, holding down the power button for a few seconds, whether on a desktop, laptop or smaller device, causes a hardware reset that bypasses the operating system.

It's the "last resort" option for when the operating system has frozen (or when the UI has frozen in Linux and a hardware keyboard is unavailable).

In my experience with Linux, which I use every day, it can cause corruption, albeit rarely.

Generally, the Linux file systems are resilient to this, which may be why you've had no problems. The Nexus 5 uses Linux's ext4, not FAT or NTFS as Windows does. The ext4 format is a solid file system.

Nevertheless, I'd rather avoid such shutdown whenever possible.

 

[BynoUK]

I've always restarted my android devices by holding power till it restarts, never encountered an issue. I could be lucky however but always believed it was an ok thing to do....

 

[Paddy Landau]