December 30, and about 25 hours before a new year. I should change all my smoke alarm batteries.
Since I’ve had my Samsung Galaxy S4 phone, I have had trouble with the phone touchpad during making or receiving phone calls. Soon after I got it a year and a half ago I got a Body Glove case and screen protector for it. Also it got the upgrade from Jelly Bean to KitKat. I started to have problems with the phone and I initially thought it had something to do with KitKat. The screen would go black during the call, and almost nothing I did would make the touch dial come back. Sometimes I could press the on/off button and get out of the phone and back to the apps.
Recently I found that the screen protector was getting scratched so I got a replacement Body Glove, with a dark blue case with light blue trim. It was much better with no scratches. Still the phone calls were just as bad if not worse than they were before. If I tried to erase my voice mail messages, it was nearly impossible, as were any interactive menus during any call. It got to the point where I gave up on my VMs, and that wasn’t all that bad because most of them were robocalls and spammers.
In mid- December, I got a message that my S4 was due to be updated to Lollipop. I was hopeful that whatever was causing the phone problem would be fixed in this update. But I was sadly disappointed to find that the update didn’t help – no change.
As part of turning over a new leaf this new year, I decided to do some searching to see if I could find some info and possibly narrow the problem down to some menu setting or whatever to make the problem go away. I did find several hits, one of which was about a proximity sensor. So I found some details online about this, including where it was located. The sensor is located to the right of the earphone, at the top, next to the edge of the Body Glove case. There are holes in the screen protector to allow the two devices to be unobstructed. Well, everything looked okay to me; the sensors were not obstructed. But to make sure I took the Body Glove case off and cleaned the screen to the right of the earphone. I then made a call, and it worked! No more problem! So I put the Body Glove case back on and tried to call, and now the problem is back!
This really had me flummoxed. What is causing the case to create the problem? Was it the light blue trim that is just above the sensors? Is it the screen protector? I can’t see how because the screen protector has a hole that does not block the proximity sensor. What is it? At least I know what is causing the problem, but what can I do to fix it other than to get rid of the case? I will have to experiment to find out.
Update – I decided that it might help if I took a black magic marker and covered the light blue trim above the proximity sensors with dark black. I drew over the light blue trim, but moving the tip seemed to cause the black ink to thin out. So I made a series of dark dots and it looked a lot darker. The black is about 0.4 inch or 1 cm wide. I tried making a call and it worked! Such an easy fix. And all these months I have been using a phone with a screen that was unable to show the display during a phone call, just because the Body Glove case was reflecting the light back into the proximity sensor, making it think it was always against my ear. If only I had done this a long time ago!
