Friday, March 06, 2015

~ One Plus One: Black screen of death ~

Until last night I had only heard & experienced blue screen of death, the famous fatal error on your Windows OS. It all changed when my 3 month old OnePlus One went completely dark. Double tapping or pressing the power button didn't wakeup the display nor the glow on softkeys. However, the notification light was glowing & the phone had about 65% battery. 

My wife noticed that something was wrong w/ my phone and when I explained what had happened, she taunted me saying that's why I never want to own a Chinese smartphone. 3 weeks ago she had told me about her colleague's experience, who switched from iPhone to One+, had similar issues. She got the issue resolved by visiting One+ Support Centre. Never found what the problem was with her device, am guessing mine was similar. The last thing I wanted to do find & visit the support centre. All this at 1am IST & didn't have energy to google on the issue.


Woke up today morning and the first thing I did was lookup "Black screen of death one plus one", lo and behold what do I see? I wasn't the first one to have experienced this. Many of them had already experienced & I knew there would be DIY solution.



Went through the official forums and was able to resolve the issue. Here are the steps:


  1. Press both the power and volume up buttons for about 10 seconds. The phone will reboot and entered the "Fastboot" mode. Did wait for few mins thinking it will reboot, but didn't.
  2. Next press both the power and volume low buttons for about 10 seconds. This time the phone rebooted in the standard boot cycle and started fine.

Not sure of the RCA (Root Cause Analysis) for this one. The last action I had performed yesterday before the phone slipping into the blank screen, was using the camera. Additional reading on the forums for similar issue didn't find yield any commonality. The use-case is diverse:

  1. Just after a ending an voice call
  2. While browsing
  3. When the battery was very low < 9%
  4. Processor strategy value
  5. In my case, I had used the camera app without any issue
As you notice, there is common pattern which could cause the issue. Nor is there an official communication from OPO on the site.