Thursday 15 August 2013

Android Keys Not Working

Recently, I dropped my android smart phone (its a Samsung Galaxy S2 I9100, Poland version) accidentally in water. Took it out immediately, opened, battery removed and put to dry. Got help from my lap fan outlet to get it dried with some good hot air!

The phone was working well till booting up, showing up menu and apps, tried calling, tried Blue-tooth and Wifi; everything was working fine.

No. no luck. The power button is not getting functional except for powering on the phone. Locking or the menu (Restart/Power Off/Air-plane Mode) on long press is not available. The battery is getting drained in 6-7 hours of time, which lasted 1-1.5 days with moderate use. Also noticed one more behaviour, the battery charging animation upon charging when the phone is turned off, getting stuck if I remove the power cable! Also, I cannot start the phone from that state using power button. I have to remove the battery to bring it back to original state and to use power button to boot the phone.

Went to nearest Samsung Service Centre and got the phone verified by them. They said they need to change the power button - a hardware failure. No answer for the question "then why it can be used to boot the phone?". Anyway, they are experts. So asked them to order the hardware for it and paid the advance.

Came home thinking, how to check the hardware of the key from software side. Planned to write my own Android app. And yup. Wrote a Key Tester app and it is available for you too @ https://play.google.com/store/search?q=FLOSS%20AG. But later when in to developing it, came to know that the app cannot do anything for me! Because it is not possible to capture the Home and Power key actions from Android apps, unless we register the app for the same, which won't work for my use.

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