Soft Brick, Hard Brick, and Broken Android Device

A smartphone is one of the most important possessions for most users. It allows greater ease of communication and versatility in how people use technology. The increasingly connection to the Internet of phones enable users to do shopping, communication and trip planning on the go. However, if your phone is unbootable, first you need to find out whether it is hard brick, soft brick or plain broken.

The word "brick", when used in reference to consumer electronics describes an electronic device such as a smartphone, game router or tablet computer, due to a serious misconfiguration, corrupted firmware or a hardware problem, can no longer function.

When your phone boots and shows the screen and then immediately and automatically turns off, or it keeps restarting with vibrations, or it is totally dead without any visible signs, all these signals indicate that your phone is bricked.

Soft Brick

Soft brick is the state of android device due to some software problems like bootloops or device freezing at some point during boot. This may occur if some software problem occurred in the device mainly during OS upgrade or flashing something such as a custom ROM, camera mod or app in your custom recovery mode. A soft-bricked device is only half-dead. Because of this, your device is not booting anymore or is constantly crashing but can be recognised by a computer.

When your phone is soft brick, don't be panic. You can revive your Android device as long as it is only soft-bricked. The basic solution for this issue is flashing a clean and working version of Android to your device. While, during this process, you may need to restore a backup, flash a  custom ROM or stock images to your device.

Hard Brick

Hard brick is the state of android device that occurs when your device is unbootable without a bootloop. A hard Brick device generally show little to no signs of life. If this happens, you had better to buy a new device since your device is showing you a black or grey screen at this point.

A phone get hard-bricked due to trying install ROM not made for the device or use ROM Manager incorrectly. Hard brick is more difficult to resolve and you may require an expert to give you professional advice. However you can recover from hard brick by using JTAG or send your Phone to JTAG service center to get it fixed, which means you no longer need to buy a new one.

Broken Android Device

Broken Android device is a state of Android device that occurs when any hardware component of device break down. A broken Android device is more serious than soft brick and hard brick. The device can no longer turning on and it is just like a brick. The device gets broken due to electrical over charge, device dropped, water spilled and so on. If this happens, all you can do is to have the electrical component repaired or replaced or to buy a new device.