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Blackberry Playbook died (black screen of death)

kat · 1 · 33380

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Offline kat

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Problem Description
Blackberry's Playbook isn't immune from problems, the "Black Screen of Death" being one whereby the screen suddenly goes 'black' and the device becomes unresponsive; pressing the power button does nothing (note that this tends to be a non-responsive system and/or screen rather than a "bricked" device). To test what type of 'crash' this is, press the "up" ("+") and "down" ("-") volume buttons at the same time, the 'shortcut' to using the Playbooks camera, if the screen is blacked pressing the two buttons will result in the camera-click noise which informs us the device is on but the screen is non-responsive. If nothing happens the device likely had a full system crash (this assumes there isn't a fundamental hardware fault or failure in the device).

Problem Solution
In either/or situation the fix is to reboot the device. This is done by holding down the 'Power' and '+' ("Up") buttons at the same time for a number of seconds until the small red 'activity' LED lights up. Alternatively, hold them down for a few seconds, release and then press the 'Power' button again. Either/or should work depending on whether it's a system crash or just the black screen of death (sometimes doing this may seem unresponsive, so although the aforementioned are supposed to be the correct way to reboot, try also holding down the 'power', 'up' and 'down' buttons for a few seconds, release and then press the power button again to start).

Why does this happen
There are a number of reasons for the Playbook to crash, typically it will be the result of an app or a flash-heavy website trying to do a lot of CPU/GPU intensive actions at the same time (not to mention poor scripting) rather than the Blackberry itself causing the problem. Turning off flash/script support may help for website related crashes. Make sure to be running a fully updated system for everything else.