Recently, my Galaxy S21 FE’s screen died. I had to switch to an old phone to hold me over until I could get a new one. In the meantime, I got bored and searched the web for potential fixes for a dead phone screen. One actually worked—but you shouldn’t try it.
The Incident
It was a regular Saturday afternoon. I watched It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (I’ve been rewatching the show for, like, the eighth time, best TV show ever) with my phone sitting on the coffee table.
I reached for the phone, but it slipped and fell from the table onto the carpet. Now, that carpet isn’t one of those thick, fuzzy rugs that act as a sponge when something falls on them, but still, it’s a carpet, and I had expected the phone would be fine. I mean, it survived a nasty, screen-first drop onto a tile floor of my apartment building’s lobby without a scratch just a few weeks ago.
But falling from an 18-inch-high table did it. I picked it up, and the screen was black after attempting to unlock the phone. Pressing the power button did nothing, but I noticed the phone was working because it played a notification sound when I plugged it into the charger. Still, the screen was dead and gone.
The Aftermath
The good news was that I was able to connect the phone to my monitor via my UGREEN Steam Deck dock (those things are handy!), with Samsung Dex automatically launching as soon as I connected the HDMI cable to the dock. I was even able to hook a mouse and keyboard to the dock and navigate the phone, but the screen stayed dead.
- Input
-
1E+2 Volts
- Number of Docking Ports
-
4
This compact and versatile dock provides multiple ports, including USB, HDMI, and Ethernet, for enhanced connectivity and performance.
To add insult to injury, the touch-screen worked when I enabled the “Use your phone as a touchpad” option in Dex. I was able to use the screen as a touch pad, and even use the fingerprint sensor to sync my 2FA app’s vault. But the screen remained dead after disconnecting the phone from the dock.
Another catch was that I had to wait until early October for the 256GB version of the Pixel 10 Pro to return to shelves in my neck of the woods. In other words, I needed to either fix the S21 FE or get a stopgap phone.
A quick visit to a couple of repair shops revealed that replacing the S21 FE’s screen would cost me about 200 euros, so I decided to take my old Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 out of the drawer and use it until I buy a new phone. Despite its age, the Mi Mix 2 handled my daily routine like a champ for a week.
Then came Sunday afternoon, I got bored, so I pulled the S21 FE out of the drawer. It was time to try all those totally reliable dead-screen fixes found on the web.
The Fix
I let the phone charge for a bit, held the power button until it vibrated, so I knew it was still functioning aside from the dead screen. I then connected it to the dock and found that everything, aside from the screen, still worked perfectly. It was time to test some kludgy dead screen fixes.
The first couple of solutions included force restarting the phone, finger tapping the entire surface of the screen, and “massaging” the phone with a soft cloth; those didn’t do the trick. I even tried to open the camera app by double-pressing the power button like a madman, which worked for some people, to no avail.
I was done with harmless methods. It was time to potentially damage the phone, with a slim chance of fixing it. I took my chances because I had nothing to lose. The Mi Mix 2 worked great, and I was only a few short weeks away from getting a new phone.
The first heavy-handed method included hitting the phone on the back and front, and I got really into it. At one moment, I thought the screen would crack. Yet again, no dice. It was time for extreme measures.
The last solution I tried was putting the phone in a freezer. I first checked to see if the phone was still working. Dex launched fine, so I unhooked the phone from the dock and chucked it into my freezer. The usual advice is to leave it there for about 10–15 minutes, but I kept it there for like an hour.
When I took it out, ice crystals formed all over the screen. The thing was cold as, well, ice. I let it thaw for a couple of hours while I went for a walk and finished some errands. When I got back, I hooked the phone to a charger, but it didn’t emit any sound. I thought that was it; I had finally broken the phone for good. It was an interesting experiment, but it ended in utter failure.
But just a few moments later, a charging icon appeared on the screen. It appears that keeping the phone inside the freezer drained the battery. However, it started charging, and the charging icon lit up with a brightness of a thousand suns!
I’m overselling it, sure, but the moment I saw the screen coming back from the dead was, hands down, one of the best feelings I’ve had recently. I somehow managed to fix a phone I had written off a week earlier. It was alive!
Do I recommend you do this to your phone? Heck no! Chucking a phone in a freezer can lead to all kinds of bad stuff. Condensation can build up inside the phone, you can mess up its electronics, drain or damage the battery, and so on. The only reason I did it was because I had nothing to lose. I already had a new phone lined up, and my stopgap phone worked great.
I was super lucky—especially since my phone’s backside had peeled away from the chassis, leaving the battery and all those sensitive components exposed to freezing temperatures, with condensation likely building up inside the moment I took it out.
But it somehow survived, and then some. Here I am, writing this piece on a Friday afternoon with the phone still working like clockwork for almost five days. While I managed to get it back to the land of the living, I can’t wait to get a new phone because I’m pretty sure the S21 FE’s screen will turn black yet again, sooner rather than later.
