kyocera phone locked

[petemasters]

hi and tia,

kyocera s4 android one, boots as far as the pattern security screen, accepts the pattern ok but cannot load to homescreen. Goes round and round for a while, sometimes comes back to pattern screen and sometimes switches off.

I tried holding vol and on/off switch and it goes into a kind of reset mode. but it says LOCKED in red letters.
It is my student’s phone, we are in Japan, the phone has a Japanese interface, but thats not a problem. She is a lady in her 60s she’s not phone savvy at all. She said she took it to the shop and they told her to buy a new one, which she did.

I am certain that she didn’t lock it herself, so the shop must have done it. They transferred her sim card and all her data onto the new phone. I don’t need anyone to tell me to do anything dodgy, we can go back to the shop and prove ownership if we need to.

My Questions -
was the phone repairable/recoverable, ?
can we unlock it, ?
can we do a factory reset, ?
should I bin it ?

thanks

Pete

 

[Dannydet]

It may be that the battery is shot and cannot hold a charge anymore.
If it switches off by itself that's an indicator right there

 

[petemasters]

Hi, I’m not sure how good the battery is, but when I first got the phone, it switched on momentarily then went off then wouldn’t switch on at all. I charged it and the red light showed for a few hours then turned to green. Since then it switches on and gets to the pattern screen, then stays on for over a minute at a time while trying to load the opsys. I’ve been round that cycle 20-30 times and its still powering up fine. I’d say the battery was at least ok. Many times it doesn’t switch off, it gous back to the pattern screen and stays on there.

 

[Hadron]

I don't think the phone has been locked by anything. Volume + on/off switch sounds like a recipe for booting into the bootloader (the precise shortcuts vary between phones, which is why I say "sounds like"), and I would expect the bootloader to tell you that it is locked, since that is the normal state. If you can describe the screen in more detail we may be able to confirm, but nothing you've said there suggests anything unusual.

Your problem is hard to diagnose though because the symptoms are not very specific: it sounds like it is mostly booting up but is failing when you try to unlock to access the user interface. The fact that it sometimes switches off at that point does however suggest a hardware issue to me rather than a software one. It could be the battery, because one symptom of a weak battery is a phone restarting or shutting down when you demand a bit more from it (e.g. open a camera or try using GPS), so it might be that the point at which the phone tries to connect to the network is pushing it beyond its limits. But it could be something else as well. The fact that it always fails at this point is the thing that makes me wonder whether it is actually something else (a battery fault could be variable in its effect), but that's not necessarily better (e.g. if part of the storage chip has failed, causing it to crash at that point, then that's harder to fix than a battery).

If it wasn't shutting down sometimes I'd suggest a factory reset. If all of the data she wants are already saved or transferred you could try that and see. If the problem is software (other than system software) that should fix it, but the shutting down is the thing that I find hard to reconcile with that. But I'd certainly try that before binning it (indeed, basic data security says you should do so before getting rid of it!).

 

[petemasters]

Hi thanks for your reply

the screen I get when holding down power and vol up/down buttons continuously is this....

if I press vol button, I can scroll through Start, Restart Bootloader, power off, recovery mode and back to start again. restart bootloader, just quickly comes back to this screen without doing anything, recovery mode brings up a little green robot with its stomach opened and a red warning triangle on its chest, and “no command” written beneath it. If I press power button at this stage I get to the pattern screen but it still fails to load the UI.
If I choose power off, it switches off (yaay), and if I choose Start, it tries to start but fail in the same way as when I press the power on button directly.

Im not sure it is switching off. After about a minute of trying to load the UI, the screen goes black, if you touch the screen again it tries to load the UI again but then returns to the pattern screen. It never fully switches off by itself unless you tell it to.

I would happily do a factory reset but can’t see how to do it.

thanks again

Pete

 

[Hadron]

OK, that looks like a bootloader menu (they do vary a bit between manufacturers, but the main elements seem right), so don't worry about the "locked". I am more concerned that it doesn't show the bootloader or baseband versions, but let's leave that for now.

Recovery is where you do a factory reset. Many devices hide the recovery menu, so when it is on the recovery screen (dead android and red triangle) try pressing volume up and power keys at the same time. If that doesn't give you a menu it may be that these people use a different combination to get it, but it should be something like that. I do not know why they put this extra obstacle in the way, since anyone who has found recovery mode probably wants to do a reset (there's not much else it can do for you).

 

[ocnbrze]

that screen is your fastboot mode.

if you can get to recovery mode, you can try and see if a hard reset will fix the issue.....i doubt it, but it is worth a try.
https://www.hardreset.info/devices/kyocera/kyocera-s4/recovery-mode/

if that does not work you can try and use fastboot commands to get into recovery. but you will need to get adb setup and the phone would have to have had usb debugging enabled. if it was not....which in most cases it is not, then fastboot commands will not work.

 

[petemasters]

Hi Hadron, yes holding power button and vol up seems to be the only combination that does anything, but it just causes it to loop from distressed robot to rainbow logo and back to the robot. other combination (power + vol down, or power + vol central) either do nothing at all or just returns to the revorey screen. Any short presses just results in the phone starting up and ending up at the pattern screen.

I checked online and the only mentions of Kyocera S4, or Android One say that to bring up the factory reset menu, you have to hold power + vol up.

So your suggestion seems right by this phone won’t play ball.

Ocnbrze, thanks for the link, but my recover screen doesnt look like the one on there, and I have no option to do a reset. your info about fastboot commands, adb setup, and usb debugging is way out of my league I’m afraid.

Thanks all

 

[petemasters]

ok ??? So is that the end of the road ?