I have the Pixel 5A 5G. It’s been my main phone for 2 years. Love it. Two weeks ago it started to exhibit the well-known motherboard issue where the screen doesn’t turn on. I’ve kept it on my desk since then, massaging it, cooling it, charging it and discharging it. And eventually it turns on for a few minutes and I back up my data and set up a new phone. So far so good.
Today, it turned on again, I double checked everything, and did a factory reset. And now it’s working fine. The screens turning on every time…
I don’t know if I can trust this device anymore, having the phone just die completely for 2 weeks isn’t acceptable. I’m not sure if I have the BGA motherboard issue, where I actually need to get the CPU reballed, or if the factory reset was sufficient…
So now my phone is a zombie…
Anyone else have a similar experience with the 5As? I saw the resolution most people took was sending the phone back to Google, and getting either refurbished model or a pixel 6. But now that it’s working that avenues not available to me
Update: the screen died after 5 hours of working, guess I’m now happy that it is infact a hardware issue and not firmware issue.
Update on the update: after having the issue become very intermittent, I had the CPU reballed. And it appears to have resolved the issue. The phone has been running under a stress test for over 100 hours. Without losing the screen or going off
Luckily I found a repair shop that was willing to reball it, everyone I talked to said it’s not worth trying to fix, it’s unlikely to work. This shop just shrugged their shoulders and said it’s not going to work, but for 50 bucks we’ll do it anyway. So I rolled the dice and I won
…
That being said, I’m not going to trust this device, as a daily driver. But I think it’s proven itself well enough to be a backup.
…
I went to the cell phone mall, you know the type, 500 little booths all selling the same things over and over again. Most of the booths with people sitting around idly not doing anything. I walked around the very dark back part of this area, until I found a shop that had equipment I could recognize, anti-static mats, microscopes, a reflow workstation, dental picks, actual SMT soldering equipment, a wave solder station, would you even believe a vent hood?.. And everybody in this shop was doing work. So I figured, this was the right group of people to actually get the CPU reballed. And they were quite helpful. Apparently they’re the actual engineering shop that everyone else uses. It’s good to go directly to the source.
But believe me when I say it wasn’t working. It just wouldn’t boot. I could hear it buzzing sometimes. But I couldn’t get the screen to turn on. I put it in the freezer, and that made it boot for about 90seconds.
The phone died while I was taking a photo of a train. And today randomly it just turned on on my desk, and driving me insane
I’ve had it play a 4K YouTube video for 2 hours. And now I’ve been recording a video for 20 minutes. It hasn’t crashed, the screen still on… I’m trying to get it to die again to prove I wasn’t going crazy.
I think what this tells me is the phone was bricked due to a firmware issue, not a hardware issue. And the factory reset got it into a good state.
That’s super concerning. A pixel 5A is breaking itself is very scary. The forums for Pixel 5A call it a motherboard issue, but this feels like a firmware issue instead
Was the phone exposed to rain? Could be some droplets that got through some crack and which have now dried out (beware the rust though in that case). I can’t think of anything else honestly. However your idea of stress-testing is good, I’d also try to run a bunch of benchmarks on it.
