It was Saturday morning, and I thought of checking my WhatsApp status and message on my Android phone, and the display went black. I can see partial screen now and then, with a green line at the top, sometimes a green square covering 1/3rd of the screen. My thoughts are holy crap, not again, I need to buy or replace my phone again, as I got this phone not a year ago.
After checking the phone, only the display is not working rest of the functionality seems to be working. My company provides the phone I am currently using, so I want talk to them first.
Okay, fine. Let's see what I can do in this situation and write 4 points.
- E-sim issue
- I need to find a device that has e-SIM capability, and a phone with this capability is not cheap.
- I have to go to the Airtel showroom (I did).
- New proof, the problem is this in my father's name.
- Buy a new Android phone
- A decent Android phone costs around 30K ruppees. It's a new year, and I don't want to spend the bulk of my amount on a new mobile.
- I know my primary sim is gone for a few days, so let's have an emergency number for contact with family.
- Why not buy a dumb keypad phone that supports all mobile operators?
- I bought the HMD 4G keypad mobile for 2400 rupees for emergency
contact with my family and friends.
- I will write more about the HMD phone in a separate blog.
- Backup important data
- I charged the phone for 2 to 3 hours and prayed it would be back to normal for a few minutes so I could back up important data.
- Photos, Documents, and some videos.
- It came back to normal, then plugged into my laptop and gave file transfer permission.
- Enable USB debugging and wireless debugging for screen mirroring.
- Parallely, when backing up, I have enabled USB debugging and wireless debugging.
- Done adb pairing with laptop using adb pair <ip addr>:<port>
- Downloaded scrcpy static binary build and I can screen mirror it in laptop woooh SAFEEE..
- To keep the screen awake, I installed caffinate from F-Droid.
After some time
After a while, my phone seems to be back to normal after I keep the phone turned on for a day (caffinate app). So I guess the issue is software, I have factory reset the phone, now it works properly, but still the display flickers.
Learnings
- Have an emergency dumb phone. You can get one for less than 3000 rupees.
- I don't plan on using E-sim here after (Until it is available in a mid-budget phone).
- You can enable default option to be done when USB is connected in developer settings.
- If developer settings is enabled some app won't work - IRCTC, Banking apps.
- JIO SIM won't work unless it is a 4G phone.