2/21/2012

The App that revived my heart beat

Last evening, the power button of my phone stopped responding, and so did my heart. How it happened is still a mystery. Who is responsible for the destruction is still questionable. I am still working on the case.
My phone almost always remains in silent mode. Mainly Coz I believe the phone is for me to contact people, when am in need. I am quite popular for not picking up calls (I don’t realize it is ringing 95% of the time) and not responding to messages. Even Manu does not list me as his emergency contact.

Poor Manu was contacting me for emergency (Read - To locate me and pick me up from wherever I was lost). I had reached home earlier and conveniently forgot to inform him. Itz customary of me to carefully place (dump) the phone somewhere, as soon as I reach home. The phone kept ringing & as part of silent mode, this thing kept on vibrating until it finally plunged to the floor. My visualization involves the phone diving deep with head first & the power button absorbing the impact of the fall. End result: The display is not cracked, but the damage is done. The Power button does not respond.

The suspects:
• Manu – The guy who kept on calling. Shouldn’t he realize that I am not picking up for a reason?
• Nexus I – For the irresponsible jump it had with head first.
• Me – Since I was sick & tired, I made the mistake of forgetting about the phone & Manu!
• My carelessness (Manu insists this), which I clearly don’t see anywhere in the picture!

Anyways, later when Manu reached home and helped me to locate the phone, we found it in a coma state. It wasn’t responding to my multiple desperate attempts to turn on and bring it back to life.

The major problem, which I have never given a thought about, is that there is only one interface to wake up the display And/Or power up the phone. Through the night I prepared myself to spend a fortune on a new hand set. Which means, I will have to give up on the next travel plan :-(

But, over the past year, Winson has taught me ask as many questions to a problem as possible. Here goes my line of thoughts -
Am I the first person encountering this problem? How did others fix it? Do everyone spend money for that? Do everyone go back to HTC and get this repaired? Well, are the spare parts even available? Google had stopped production of this handset almost a year ago. My last hope was colleagues who frequently travel to China. Later, my faith in Android developers beckoned me to search the net.

And Yaay !! Engineers are awesome! Thank you Guys!

You can trick the nexus one to boot up, by following the below steps:
1. Plug the phone into the USB attached to your computer.
2. Then pull the battery.
3. When the charging light goes off, reinsert the battery
4. If it doesn't work the first time, don’t panic (like me) Keep trying.
5. It took me 4 tries to see the result – ultimate wakeup.

Once it is boot up, go to the Market & search for the apps which will tweak other keys to do the power on. I tried these 2 on my Nexus One & they are great, no-nonsense apps which serves the purpose.
Fix Broken Power Button (I love this name, so I am sticking to this)



AnyUnlock
also seems popular.

Apparently, this problem will hit the Nexus users eventually coz of the design. This final revelation adds a major candidate to our suspect list.
• Google! Coz of the poor design.

Did the cable between the power button circuitry and Main board get damaged yesterday?
It could just be a coincidence that maybe I had just kept it down on the floor, of all the space in my home!

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