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Were you looking forward to just relaxing at the end of the day playing some online casino games only to discover that the power button your phone does not work? Ugh. Frustration, annoyance, and taking a sledgehammer to the phone is definitely out of the question.
This happened to me this week and only thing that I could think about was the famous quote, “Do as I say, not as I do.” For all of my children, I never allowed to them to even take their phones or tablet out of the box until we had purchased a shock proof cover for the item. I was fanatical about this for my kids. They could take their tablet, throw it across the room, and it would literally bounce like a ball. That was how good their tablet cases were.
My son would regularly drop his tablet from his top bunk onto the tile floor of his bedroom, 5 feet below, no problems.
But when I went to buy a phone for myself, do you think that I followed my own insane strict standards. Nope.
I brought myself and two of my boys new phones recently. For my two boys, I was still the fanatic strict mom, and I would not press the “buy” button until they had picked a silicon case to go with the phone. No case, no phone.
I just had to have my new phone, and probably due to the corona virus, there was no case for the model phone that I wanted. It was a Doogee N100, with a massive 10000 mAh battery, so it did not fit even generic cases. So I didn’t buy a case, I let my 7 year use my phone, phone drops to the floor, and now the power button does not work.
So what do I do?
I had to find an alternative.
I can talk about what did not work, but I will just stick with what finally did work.
I ended up installing the application Pick To Wake. But in order to get the application to work correctly, I had to whitelist the Pick To Wake application, so it would not shut down or go to sleep when the phone went to sleep.
This setting was controlled on the screen to change from one open app to another when the phone is not asleep. To get to this screen, click on the button on the bottom of your phone that will allow you to change from one open app to another. On that screen you will see a tool button. That is the button you want to click on.
The next screen will say “White List”. This is a whitelist of the applications that will not shut down / go to sleep, when the phone is locked. Android also calls this automatically cleaning up the application 1 minute after the phone is locked.
Unfortunately, this setting is not controlled through the normal Android settings. So unless you know where to look, you would never find this setting on your own.
This specific application does not put the phone to sleep. In order to put the phone to sleep without the power button, I installed an application called Assistive Touch.
Assistive Touch basically puts a fourth button at the bottom of the phone which looks like a little person. When this button is clicked, a bunch of other buttons is shown including assistant, accessibility selector, power, volume down, volume up, recent apps, brightness down, brightness up, and lock screen. These buttons are large, so they are also very useful if you are having trouble touching the small onscreen buttons associated with these actions.
Summary
There were other applications that I had tried “Shake to Wake”, “Shake To Sleep”, etc. They would seem like they worked, and then they would not work. I do not know if the problems had to do with the application going to sleep while the phone was asleep or if the problem had to do with the other applications having too many ads and causing problems because of that.
As for the phone going to sleep, the “Assistive Touch” application works great. I would recommend someone install that app even if they do not have problems with their volume or power button.
But at end of the day, “Do as I say, and not as I do.” Stick with the rule of not taking your phone out of the box until you have purchased a shockproof case that can withstand a fall from a top bunk to a tile floor. Better yet, do not even put the phone into your shopping cart until you have the case.
Even moms fall victim to not being able to hold off opening the new toy. Give a parent a new toy, and they forget that they are the parent.
