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Help S3 LTE blacks out, im worried

C

cazeto

Lurker
Hello.

Once a day or every other day my Samsung Galaxy S3 blacks out. It can be working fine, and I lock the screen, when I try to use it again it wont respond. No matter what I click on, the home, power, volume buttons - nothing happens. Even putting it to a charger wont do anything. The only way I can make it work again is to take the battery out and put it back in, it reboots then and is working fine until next time. It seems to do this more often in powersafe mode, but i'm not really sure. I'm just worried abot my phone.
Any ideas whats wrong?

Sorry for my bad english, I hope you can understand what im trying to say.

Thanks
 
Probably not, if just pulling the battery and putting it back reboots the phone. That means that the battery has enough power to run the phone, so it's not bad.

The operating system is locking up for some reason. (BTW, Powersave just puts the CPU into a slower speed mode - the faster the CPU, the more power it uses - so this wouldn't have anything to do with the problem).

First try running in safe mode. Turn the phone off. Turn the phone on and as soon as you see the startup text, press and hold the Volume Down key. Keep it pressed until the phone finishes booting. It will still work the way it did out of the box, but all the apps you've installed will be 'gone'. Run like tht for a few days. (If you have to restart for any reason, restart into safe mode again. If the phone works, one of your apps is causing the problem.

Restarting without holding the Volume key will put it back into normal mode.

If that doesn't fix it, you can try two things, either of which is a major pain. Try a factory reset (it'll be like the day you got it out of the box - back up anything you don't want to lose before you reset it.). If that doesn't fix it (run it a few days to make sure), bring it to the carrier's store and ask if they can reflash the ROM 9or where the nearest store that can is. Have them reflash the ROM. (You can do it yourself with Odin or Kies if you get the ROM from SamMobile Firmwares but if you mess it up it's your problem. If they do it and mess it up, the worst that can happen is that they have to give you another phone.)
 
I wouldn't necessarily rule out the battery. I was having a problem where my phone would just die (as if the power was cut) usually if I was using it with it showing <30% power. If I plugged it in the battery would usually show 20 to 30% charge more than where it died at (this is as soon as I plugged it in) and reboot with that amount of life (at least till decided to die again). Anyway long story short I tinkered and troubleshot off and for weeks but eventually replaced the battery and things are good again.
 
Thanks for all the answers!

It might be the battery, I'll buy a new one, it's only $20. And see if that helps. I found out that many S3's have a similar problem and a new battery fixed a lot of them.

Im not really sure about the safety mode as I use my phone alot and all the apps i have installed - I'll try to clean up in my apps and see if that will help.

Back to the problem Ive had another shutdown or black out yesterday. I was watching a youtube video (through the youtube app) in landscape/fullscreen - I'd hit the lock/power button instead of the volume button and it wouldnt respond, did the battery thing and tried again, I'd hit the lock button again by a mistake while watching as before and my phone did it again, tried 5-6 times and everytime my phone went dead. I had around 60% power and the power safe mode was off. Could this be a clue?
 
Solution found!

So I uninstalled a bunch of apps and that fixed the problem, but I have a app in mind that I think caused the main problem. It's a app called "Searchlight flashlight" provided by northcoastmedia in the app store. The app came with a widget which I had on my homescreen which could toggle the flashlight on and off. I think the widget caused the problem or the app itself. The majority of the time the widget wouldnt even work. So far my phone has been running for 50+ hours with no problems.

Thanks for all the help in here. I know where to ask next time.

Cheers
 
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