Turn Off Screen without Standby

[Wijono]

I started to use new Galaxy S5 about four months ago.
Now I face a problem that the device won’t wake up from Standby, when I press either Power Button or Home Button, the screen stay black, only Back Button and Recent Apps Button that light up. Only if I press Power Button repeatedly the device may wake up.
Is there a way to turn off the screen (to preserve the battery) without going to Standby (to avoid problem above)?
BTW, apps such as Blank Screen or Black Screen still drain the battery substantially, about 4% an hour.
Help …. Please.

 

[B. Diddy]

Try booting into Safe Mode, which temporarily disables all 3rd party apps. https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-10696


If the problem disappears in Safe Mode, then something you installed is causing the problem. You may have to uninstall apps one by one until the problem disappears. If the problem persists in Safe Mode, then it's more likely to be a hardware or firmware problem. I'd focus on the Power button--perhaps it needs to be replaced.

You can also try wiping the cache partition: http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-10404

EDIT: I saw from your other similar threads that you're already tried Safe Mode, and the problem persists. Wiping cache is still worth trying.

How do you know that Blank Screen or Black Screen drain the battery? Do the battery stats still show significant usage by Screen?

 

[Wijono]

Thank you Diddy for your response.
Wiping the cache partition did not solve the problem. I believe it must be hardware problem.
The problem can be worked around by using Blank Screen, but as I mentioned earlier Blank Screen drains battery quite a lot, about 4% an hour, it can be seen from monitoring Battery Level when only Blank Screen is running (nothing else), also confirmed by Battery Statistics.
Whereas if I lock the screen, the decrease in Battery Level is less than 1% an hour.

 

[B. Diddy]

Oh, so it's the actual Blank Screen app that is listed as using that much battery? That sounds pretty counterproductive.:-\

 

[Wijono]

As mentioned in my earlier post, I tried to work around the “Black Screen of Death” by never let the S5 goes to sleep. My final selection of apps to accomplish that is “Keep.Screen.On.Free.v.1.00.04”, because it has a small foot print (67kB), and it has auto run on restart; the other one is “Black Screen.ver.1.1”.
That combination of apps still draw an appreciable current, the battery level is down of about 3-4 percents an hour, that is understandable, because with the Black Screen the AMOLED is not off, just displaying black color screen.
In pursue of less battery drainage, I have turned off the Auto Brightness, and set the brightness manually to a point slightly before the screen start to flicker/flash. And it is a blessing in disguise, with such a setting; the “Black Screen of Death” never comes again!
The technical explanation may probably as follows: the “Black Screen of Death” is caused either by the malfunction of the regulator circuit that powers the screen, in the sense that it become too sensitive, or there is a leakage in the screen circuit itself, so that when the brightness is set too high = high current, the regulator circuit is tripped and shut down the power to the screen, hence the “Black Screen of Death”, and that event is avoided by setting the brightness quite low as I did.
Another important thing I found is that when we let the device go to sleep as the Screen Timeout is elapsed, then it will first go through dimming where rigorous flashing/flickering will take place before the sleep; once that took place, then we will face multiple “Black Screen of Death” on wakeup, i.e., we have to repeatedly press Off-Home..Off-Home many times before the device will wake up.
Hopefully this will help some of you with similar problem to what I had.

 

[millemike]

I posted this in another thread, so I figured I would repeat it.. since this seems to be a similar issue.

I have had this same issue for months and it is very annoying. My 2 year contract was about to end and my S5 was to the point where I couldn't get it out of the black screen mode at all on wakeup (power button or home button). I decided to monkey with some settings and focused on the lock screen, since everything seems to work fine with the LCD, except when you are waking up into the lock screen. I noticed that I was getting a lot of lock screen notifications (email, updates, etc.). So, on a hunch I went to the sound and notifications setup and shut off the lock screen notifications. I power cycled, cleared the cache with the reboot diag mode utility and rebooted. I have to say it is like night and day for me. I have seen one occurrence of black screen, but the next push got me out. I have been basically issue free for over a week and I use my phone for work all day long. Up to the time I changed this setting, I considered my S5 a brick. I also noticed the yellow flickering on wake up has almost gone away. Now, this all could be some weird coincidence, but I have tried the cache clear on its own a few times and that has done nothing for my S5.. it flickered away and got wedged in black screen mode.

The other thing I changed was that I turned off keep screen on while charging. Now it goes to the "daydream" screen when charging. I have not seen the flickering screen when charging anymore. It used to flicker every time I charged the phone for months.

Give it a try.. hopefully this helps out someone else as well. I am delaying my S7 purchase, since my S5 is back to normal again.

-Mike