Black screen and no response from power button

[Chandler Miguelgorry]

I have been using my Nexus 4 for a while now with stock Android jelly bean 4.2.1 and have ran into this issue about 3 times now.

I have an indicator light blinking so I know the phone is on and running, but the power/lock/sleep button does not seem to be effective after multiple presses. It seems like some process has the phone frozen, and since the screen won't turn on and since I can't remove the battery, I can't power it down and reset the phone.

One time, the problem went away after about 10 minutes, the power button work and I just restarted the phone. Today however, the problem didn't go away so I help the power button down for about a minute, the indicator light went off, so I assumed power was off and then pressed the power button again and it rebooted. The strange thing is, both times I reset it, it booted with a new wallpaper, but all my homescreens, apps, widgets, etc. were all in tact..

So here are my questions:
1. Do you think this is a S/W or H/W problem? If H/W, I have already ordered a new phone from Google because of this among other issues with random reboots, battery life, etc.
2. Holding volume and power simultaneously does the hard reset right?

Has anyone experienced this issue? If so, what do you think the cause is, and how do you fix it?

 

[cyclejim]

I have the same issue as you. Contacted support, they want me to try a factory reset next. I may try that tonight. I get the random reboots and the unresponsive on/off/sleep button. You can hold both volume up and down buttons and the on/off/sleep button and it usually either reboots to recovery or just does a normal reboot. That is also random, apparently. I am a little annoyed, may just return mine entirely as I dont want to deal with hardware replacements.

 

[taj7575]

I have the same problem as well. Honestly, I'm starting to think it's an H/W issue. I've already done a factory reset, and it didn't make anything better.

 

[Rizy7]

Are you sure you guys havnt got your proximity sensors covered by a screen protector you may have purchased.

 

[minnemike]

Are you sure you guys havnt got your proximity sensors covered by a screen protector you may have purchased.

Good call!

 

[Chandler Miguelgorry]

I already ordered a new one.

I was kinda hoping I was the only one with this issue, but since I'm not the only one, I hope Google know about this and is trying to fix it. It seems like the processor is getting frozen up by some computational-heavy process or something, and can't do anything else until that frees up. Glad to know that I'm not the only one though I guess.

Definitely not that stupid /|\ in regards to the screen covers....I don't have one, just the Google bumper installed. And yes, I've tried removing the bumper to see if perhaps the button just wasn't working.