My Note4 SPen is broken in a major way (button is reversed, switches to eraser, finicky sensitivity)

[Android Central Question]

I recently had to get my Note 4 replaced. Everything was peachy in the first week or two, but my SPen suddenly went on the fritz. It started with the classic 'input while hovering' problem, which subsided with the "bang it on a table" strategy (yes, I was frustrated). Then, it went to the other end of the spectrum, with my having to press super hard at a wacky angle to get <not wobbly> scribbling (that later evolved to not working at all without jamming my pen into the screen). I don't know precisely when my menu button apparently flipped, but now I have to hold it to see a pointer, and the air command menu only appears when I remove the pen from my phone.

Now that I think of it, I'm fairly certain the eraser problem, which is the pen acting as an eraser as soon as the pen is lifted from the display, is a side effect of the sensitivity problem. I'm really at a loss for everything else, though.

This has never happened to me before, even on my old pen with a broken nib, but I want to make sure that there's absolutely nothing I can do before I drop 8-15 dollars on multiple replacements for a pen that, as mind-boggling as it seems to me, may not even be defective.

 

[Rukbat]

First, no matter how hard you press the pen into the screen, it makes no difference. The pen isn't acting like a tiny finger on the touch screen, it's interacting, electronically, with an additional layer that Samsung puts on Note screens.

Second, if it's the pen that came with the replacement phone, I'd ask for a replacement phone and screen, since either the pen or the pen layer in the screen is defective. If you kept the old pen, I'd ask for a replacement phone, since the screen isn't working the way it should.