Annoyingly, my Huawei Ascend P6 android phone (a really good phone just by the way), froze the other night whilst browsing digg.com, remaining in its locked, unresponsive state for far longer than what I was comfortable to wait.
Of course, this smart phone has a built in battery, so unlike what I used to do with the Samsung Galaxy Ace, I couldn’t just pop off the back cover and remove the battery in order to force a reboot, meaning that I needed to locate the appropriate soft reset option for my Huawei device.
As it turns out, the same key press combination used to take a screenshot on the phone, as well as force a hard reset/factory reboot of the device, is also employed if you need to do a simple device reboot: To summarize, in order to reset your frozen Huawei Ascend P6 android phone, simply press and hold both the power and volume down buttons simulataneously, for about ten seconds, until the screen goes black, the phone rumbles, and then reboots (you can let go of the buttons when the screen goes black).
Note that key combination will work regardless of whether or not the phone is frozen – if it is frozen, then the phone will reboot, if the phone isn’t frozen, it will first take and save a screenshot, before eventually triggering the reboot operation (don’t let go of the key combination during the screenshot process).
(As a bonus, if you do actually want to do a full wipe, in other words factory reset of your device, first turn off the phone, and then simultaneously press the power and volume down rocker. This will power up the device and allow you to select the factory reset option from a boot menu.)
Problem solved.
