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I have a Galaxy Nexus running on 4.0.1. I've noticed that when it crashes it usually requires a battery pull to get it working again.

I was wondering if the pulling of the battery to get the phone to work again is a "feature" of Android. The phone will otherwise stay off after a crash indefinitely until you pull the battery out and put it back in. Is there a specific reason why it cannot be turned on again without first removing the battery? Is there some benefit to this?

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  • I've tried to make your title a bit more descriptive (and cleaned up the formatting a little) now that I believe I understand what you're asking. If I've misinterpreted your question please re-edit it or @reply to me with a new comment.
    – eldarerathis
    May 18, 2012 at 1:42

3 Answers 3

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You can't remove the battery on the RAZR or MAXX, so the magical key sequence to power off is holding the volume down and the power key for 10 seconds.

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That's not entirely true. When your device crashes, Press and hold the power button for 10 seconds. The device will be rebooted. It works at least on my Galaxy S. You should try it, too.

If this method is not working, you shouldn't blame Android for that. This is the way computers work. When the Kernel runs out of memory, the device is crashed. Your screen is on or off, it doesn't matter.. The data is intact in memory (mainly RAM). The RAM is designed such that it can hold data as long as it has power supply. It's not like hard drives, DVDs etc which could hold data without power supply. When you remove battery, the RAM loses its data. So, when you start the device after that, it's like a fresh start, the kernel is loaded again in RAM to handle everything as usual.

(If you have problems understanding any terms or process in last paragraph, please see this question for some definitions.)

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It's not a benefit or a feature per se, but rather a design issue. Some devices' hardware won't respond to hardware buttons to force a reboot, necessitating a hard power off (ie, removing the battery) if the system crashes. It depends on how the hardware is designed - ie, if there is a separate circuit, not dependent on the OS, that a physical button can trigger to force a hard reboot (similar to many PCs, where holding down the power button for 5 seconds will force a hard reboot).

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  • In fact, most phones with removable batteries and all phones and tablets with fixed batteries have such a circuit. But most users aren't aware of the key combination to trigger the hardware reset (means: soft cpu reset to reboot, i don't mean 'factory reset the device').
    – ce4
    Oct 9, 2013 at 11:09

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