Several generations of phones have been made by Google by this point. I have owned a bunch of different versions. Most of my phones were mostly purchased the day they were released to the public. Right now I have moved back to using my Pixel 5 which works well enough. It is a much smaller phone than the Pixel 7 Pro. However, it has the distinct benefit of working. That is a huge game changing advantage. 

Things started to go very wrong on Friday in a very strange way. After taking the phone out of my pocket the screen just stayed black and was otherwise non responsive. Things like that have happened before and I knew to hold the power button and the up volume buttons at the same time for like 30 seconds while I wanted for the phone to reboot. This series of events happened several times during the day and it blocked me from being able to make or receive phone calls. You can imagine that it was a very frustrating experience. It really was problematic. 

Like any well trained consumer of Google products I went online to the store and found the information to report the problem and try to file an insurance claim to maybe get a new phone as this one was obviously breaking down. I have done this series of steps before a couple of times when I had broken screens. I actually have both of my old Pixel 5 smartphones that are at the ready as backup phones. That is a luxury for sure. Keeping a set of working backup phones is not something that everybody is going to maintain. In this case it was a necessity. 

My request to trigger warranty support was actually denied. I have never had that happen before and it was really just confusing. I went into the support queue and found a chat option to ask about what to do in this case. I tried to report that my Pixel 7 Pro runs Android 13 and has two distinctly weird things going on right now. First, the phone is becoming non responsive and having to be hard reset over and over again. Second, the top half of the phone screen is showing some kind of weird green dots, flashing green motion, general green hue, or going completely dark. The weird screen green coloring, flashing, and motion was certainly something that I have never seen before. 

During the support chat it was recommended that I need to factory reset the phone. It actually made me wonder how many people are getting this weird black or green screen problem. The last actual backup of my phone was from several hours earlier in the day which was not really a big deal. The loss of some phone call records or texts is not really a big deal. Having to restore all the second factor authentication elements and sign back into all the applictions is really the only super duper annoying part of the equation. Given that the phone was not really operational I went ahead and after the next reboot issued the factory reset. During the reboot the same things mentioned above happened again. I had that moment of fear where I wondered if the phone would now be bricked. A few minutes later something happened and the screen showed the normal first use start up sequence. 

Being a little flustered at that point and really just lacking any enthusiasm for the event I missed a step and it loaded factory fresh. I had to then execute another factory restart and follow the steps to catch my last backup. My only regret along the way here is that I did not get any photographs or video of what the Pixel 7 Pro was doing. Sadly, I had pulled the Pixel 5 out of storage and after powering it on it wanted to immediately execute a bunch of updates. Instead of snapping photographs I just let the device update. I’m going to circle back to the start of this essay and edit it from start to finish again before moving on to the next paragraph. Right now the Pixel 7 Pro is sitting on the charger. I just don’t trust it at this point and don’t want to carry it around. You forget just how much carrying a smartphone is about trusting that it will be your nexus of communication.