Phantom Fingers / Text Input Errors

[gizmonix]

I've been having a problem with my phone for a couple of weeks.
I'm tempted to say that it started when I upgraded to the N Beta and then rolled back to Marshmallow, but I could be mistaken about that. This may have started earlier than that or it may have been coincidental with starting around that same time period.

My problem is this:
If my phone has been on for a while, it really seems to start happening if it gets hot due to running specific games/apps, when I use a Swype style texting functionality, my words stop after a couple of letters and phantom new letters and swypes start adding on, like I am trying to use multiple fingers on my phone at the same time.

When I play a game called Word Brain, wherein you run your finger in a Word Search looking field to create words, it will lose what I am doing part way through and I won't be able to draw my word.

I have tested my keyboard and just opened my SMS app. I then held down my Delete key to see what would happen and while it does that, mystery "V"s and "g"s and "b"s start appearing.

When it gets like this, I powercycle the phone and everything is back to normal.
The screen is solid, no scratches, no cracks. And since the problem is intermittent, I don't think it's a hardware or physical problem. That said, I don't know much about phones and nervous that something worse is going on with this beast.

I'm hoping it just has to do with the beta and rollback and that it will resolve itself when I reinstall N. If anyone else has had this problem, I'd love to know how it was resolved.

I'm not rooted and am running 6.0.1

 

[Emperor]

This happened to my unit after I dropped it. I contacted Google support because I had their protection plan. They sent me a new unit with 2 days.

If you don't have any physical damage, did you try factory reset?

Nexus 128GBeast

 

[GSDer]

Did you get N via the OTA or did you load the image yourself?

I'm not sure how the rollback does things, but you might try wiping the system cache in Recovery Mode. If that doesn't help I'd reload the latest stock firmware and throw in a Factory Reset for good measure.

 

[goadamn]

So i figured out this problem and wanted to post about it.

The problem, which also impacts the fingerprint scanner and keeps me from using it, happens when charging.

It has something to do with a grounding issue.
It's not the phone or the cables as it only seems to happen with one outlet in my house (just happens to be the one by the couch where i regularly charge my phone).

When the phone is charging, it's like the screen and fingerprint scanner short out and think more is going on than there is. I essentially have to unplug the phone if I'm to use it there.

My laptop (macbookpro) has similar issues: the trackpad jumps all around if it's plugged into the wall and I'm not touching the body of the computer with another hard grounding it.

Maybe someone else will find this info helpful. I'm looking into buying my first home and i now know that i should look into this before committing to buy any place

 

[GSDer]

It has something to do with a grounding issue.

Thanks for the follow up.
Assuming that you're renting the place where this is happening you should report it to the landlord/homeowner: this could indicate a fault that might lead to a fire.

You could go to a place like Home Depot/Lowe's/your local hardware store and find a gizmo that looks like a three-prong plug which you plug into each outlet and it'll tell you if it's wired correctly. In the meantime I'd stop using that outlet altogether.