My wifes phone has started having this problem, which apparently is
well known on this model. The screen just goes black, if you press the
Home key the adjacent Recents and Back soft keys flash a couple of
times, then nothing. Pressing the Power key does nothing. If a call is
made to the phone it will ring, but no way of answering the call. The
phone can be restarted by doing a soft reset (Vol down plus Power key
for 10 seconds), and it will work for a while, maybe a day or so, then
"dies" again.
Wife took phone in to a local "phone specialist" shop, they said it
was a known problem and they could fit a new screen for £100, but no
guarantee it would work - better to spend £££s on a new phone!!
I don't think it's the screen itself anyway!
Found various web sites with instructions for getting the phone
started again - increasing levels of resets, up to a complete factory
reset, but this doesn't fix the root problem and no one admits knowing
what causes it and having a proper solution to the problem.
Anyone here had any experience with this?
Wife likes the size of this phone, and doesn't want a newer but bigger
one!

Davidm wrote:

> Anyone here had any experience with this?

I don't have experience with that phone, or with the screen blanking
problem but I still want to see if I can help you in some way perhaps.

One way might be to suggest that you take a look at enabling some of the
debugging features of the developer options (e.g., verbose logs & system
tracing settings), which I made quite good use of when I was debugging a
wi-fi problem recently.

Specifically for your graphics issue, I note that there are _pages_ of
graphics driver settings on my Android phone in the developer options.

Outside of that one graphics driver section, there are still _many_ other
graphics debugging toggles, such as show surface updates, layout
boundaries, pointer tags, secondary displays, view updates, etc.

If you're interested in mirroring your device onto a desktop, you might
also glean more information because you can run desktop-based
autoscreenshots to see "exactly" what event happened before the blackout.
<https://i.postimg.cc/tgvzsMRm/scrcpy25.jpg> Connect over Wi-Fi sans USB

At this point I'll beg out unless I have other ideas for you as I don't
want to sound like I know what I'm doing because I've never had the problem
you are having, & therefore I've never needed to think about debugging it.
--
Posted out of the goodness of my heart to disseminate useful information
which, in this case, is to faithfully try to help the original poster.

On 3/7/2023 2:57 AM, Davidm wrote:

<snip>

> Wife likes the size of this phone, and doesn't want a newer but bigger
> one!

Ran into the same issue with spousal unit and daughter not wanting
larger phones. Unfortunately, those A3 size phones don't exist in modern
phones.

Tell your wife that she'll have to get a larger phone! The smallest
current models are about 5.8" x 2.8", other than the tiny Unihertz phones

The best option, in the U.S., for a smallish size Android phone is the
Google Pixel 6a, and it has some drawbacks like no headphone jack and no
MicroSD card slot. The Pixel 5 is the smallest decent Android device but
costs more than the 6a. The 6a is $299 (unlocked) in the U.S..

A3: 130.1 x 65.5 x 6.9 mm (5.12 x 2.58 x 0.27 in)
Pixel 6a: 152.2 x 71.8 x 8.9 mm (5.99 x 2.83 x 0.35 in)
Pixel 5: 144.7 x 70.4 x 8 mm (5.70 x 2.77 x 0.31 in)

There's always the iPhone 12 Mini or 13 Mini. The iPhone 12 Mini is
expensive though, $449.99 from my carrier (unlocked after 60 days).