The Galaxy S8’s been out for a week now, which means early buyers have had a chance to test the phone in the wild. As is the case with any new smartphone, various issues were reported so far, including the red display problem that Samsung already patched, Wi-Fi connectivity issues in Korea, and wireless charging problems. But there’s a new Galaxy S8 problem that might be more serious than any of these issues. Apparently, some Galaxy S8 units reboot for no apparent reason.
Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus buyers complained on both xda-velopers and Samsung’s forums about their devices randomly rebooting.
“I’m getting the same problem on my S8 standard,” xda-developers user Gekidami said. “Randomly, the screen will have some artifacts appear (nearly always on the bottom) then it just restarts. Happens in safe mode too, so it doesn’t appear to be an app causing it. Phoned Samsung and they told me to send it back to the retailers and ask for a replacement.”
It’s unclear at this time what causes the problem. Some say it might be related to the biometrics. Having both the fingerprint reader and the face recognition feature enabled at the same time locks up the phone.
One user said that the phone may be getting “stuck in some low power state and it’s not coming back,” adding that it may have something to do with the Always On Display feature.
Others theorized it has something to do with the microSD card that’s used with the phone.
Apparently, these unwanted reboots happen quite frequently. Users who exchanged the defective Galaxy S8 units still discovered the same behavior on the replacement unit.
So I picked up my Galaxy s8 and everything seems to be working well except the phone keeps restarting itself,” user Lazazy wrote in the first post on the matter on Samsung’s forum, a thread that has some 20 pages of replies.
“I have had it for about 10 hours now, and it has already restarted 7 times while I was using it. It happens when I’m using an app like the camera or Samsung Themes, and it doesn’t matter if the phone is charging or not. All of a sudden the app freezes, the screen shuts off, and a few seconds later it restarts. Is anyone having the same problem or know of any solutions? If not, I will be going back to Sprint tomorrow.”
Samsung has not officially addressed this Galaxy S8 matter for the time being.
