Troubleshooting: Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge volume and power buttons stop working

You’re in the middle of a Google Hangouts chat on your Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge when you stop to turn down the volume and quiet down notifications. Suddenly, you find yourself pressing the volume down button to no avail. You can’t turn down the volume. You can still use the volume up button, but the volume down button doesn’t work. Then, you decide to turn off the display with the power/standby button so that you may wake the device out of sleep (a simple little jolt may do, you tell yourself), only to discover that the power/standby button doesn’t work, either. What’re you going to do? Galaxy S6 users experienced a UI bug, as well as RAM management problems and fingerprint scanner issues last year, and no handset (including Samsung’s latest) is perfect.



Fortunately, the solution is simple: you need only hold down the volume down button and the power/standby button until the screen goes black. Continue to hold until you see the phone name (“Galaxy S7 edge,” for example) appear on-screen. At that point, you’ll be brought to a menu page that can be navigated by pressing the volume up or volume down buttons. Select “reboot normally” and then press the home button to confirm this selection. Immediately, the Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge will reboot and everything should work as normal.

For some the phone might simply reboot instead of giving you any options when you hold down that button combination, in which case you simply need to let the phone boot up. My Galaxy S7 edge ran into this problem and I tried the above. It works. Despite the random problems you may encounter, though, we still think these devices will be on the very top of the Android food chain for 2016.