My phone scared me (again)

My smartphone died on me, on a totally different way than my previous one, here's how it happened, how I fixed, and what I had to do because of it.

I mentioned it already in a previous weeknotes, but I decided to write about it anyway here.

My phone for a bit more than a year has been the Poco F4, a wonderful device with a great battery and good performance. Almost as soon as I acquired it, I installed ArrowOS on it, and got it working to a very nice state. However, I made the decision to keep Google services and use it as such. Something that gave me great functionality, at the cost of submitting myself to my data-selling overlords.

It wasn’t really that bad, I just kept using it and moved on, working just fine for a long while..

After arriving to my workplace on some uneventful day, I checked my phone for a bit, left it aside, and I noticed that it turned off out of nowhere, a few seconds later, it turned on again. Then it kept going, on and off, it was one of those dreaded bootloops.

I was worried. This was not the first time something like this happened. I immediately did a button combination to boot the recovery menu, I saw the TWRP logo show up, then it turned off again. It meant I could do nothing at all.

I decided to look up online “Poco F4 stuck on bootlop”, I found a few websites but nothing seemed to be related. I added “hardware” or “power button” or something like that, and I saw some interesting comments on reddit.

Apparently, the power button on some Poco phones can get faulty, and it was being detected as “pressed”. The solution: to press the button super hard to get whatever is inside it to “seat” properly, or if that didn’t work: to use my phone like a hammer against some table edge, hitting the power button with it. Basically, to do something that alters the internals somewhat.

And it worked!

It was all good and dandy, but it was a call for attention I couldn’t ignore for long.

A while back I had made a pretty dumb purchasing decision, I bought a used flagship Xiaomi phone, the 12T Pro.

I got it for real cheap, but I was sure I could use a custom rom on it. I didn’t do my research and didn’t realize that the new version of Xiaomi’s software, HyperOS, makes it even harder to unlock the device’s bootloader.

So, yeah, I decided to leave it unused for months, as my Poco F4 was still perfectly functional.

In a matter of weeks, the issue happened again. This time I didn’t get so worried, since I knew what I had to do, however, it meant that I should get started and move all my data to my new used phone. It was only a matter of time before my Poco got too unreliable to be backed up properly.

Even though I was tempted to buy something new like the CMF Phone 2 Pro or a Pixel 9 with this issue as an excuse, I managed to control myself and just stick with what I already had.

So, yeah the scare tactics my phone pulled on me actually worked this time, I have migrated to a new phone, much earlier than expected.

Of course, the phone is kind of a privacy nightmare out of the box, so I will follow up on this with another article sharing what I did, what’s on it, and how it’s going!

This is day 69 of #100DaysToOffload

https://fosstodon.org/@joel/114549419595027121