Way back in 2019 I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 tablet, and used it mostly for the sake of the Kindle Reader app. I bought a couple of games to run on it, but for the most part is was Kindle plus debris. About a month ago, I took the S3 off its charger and woke it up. The screen came up just fine…but the touchscreen didn’t work. No matter what I touched or slid or tapped, nothing happened.
I’d never seen that particular failure mode before, but any time a computer gets weird, well, reboot. The S3 had been marvelously reliable up to that point, though recent games had animations that strained the S3’s ability to render. So I pressed the wakeup button down and held it.
Two icons appeared on the display, allowing me to select restart or power off. I tapped the restart icon. Nothing happened. I tapped the power off icon. Nothing happened. Holding the button down after the icons appeared did nothing. I started to wonder if the touchscreen had somehow failed. Well, there’s another way to power down a tablet or any other portable device: Set it on a shelf and wait for it to run its own battery down.
It took two weeks. During those two weeks I got restless and bought a nice new Galaxy Tab S9, figuring that the S3 was not coming back. The S9 is a little bigger than the S3, with more memory and a much faster CPU. I installed Kindle and a couple of games that I like. It’s a marvelous piece of work, if a little bigger than the S3 and slightly more 9X16-ish.
So after the S3 sat on a shelf for two weeks, my pressing the button no longer brought up the icons or anything else. Outa juice. I plugged it into its charger and went back to whatever I was doing. Two hours later, I pressed and held the button, and the S3 booted. The touch screen was not dead. Once it had a full charge, it came up and was fully functional. So the touchscreen hadn’t failed. Something, somewhere, probably whatever software managed the touchscreen, had crashed.
And now I have two tablets. I’m not complaining; having a spare for something I read on a lot is a good idea. But assuming the S3 was dead and dropping it in the recycle box at Best Buy had crossed my mind. I dislike dumping old hardware, so…lesson learned: Drain the battery, boot the tablet, keep the spare.
