If you’ve been scrolling through the Jeff.pro Telegram channel, you may have seen the term brick thrown about the chat, leaving some to wonder “What do bricks have to do with phones?” Well, unless you’re a corrupt politician who REALLY needs to get rid of some phones, nothing.
The term brick is often used in technology when a device (for whatever reason) stops working, and becomes as useful as a brick. There are two types of bricks though, and we will be discussing what they are, and why they might happen.
Soft Bricks vs. Hard Bricks
Soft Brick - soft bricking happens for many reasons, a corrupted firmware installation, a failed rooting attempt, viruses or malware, or attempting to flash a locked boot loader to name a few.
Soft bricked devices can power on, but typically do not make it very far into the boot process before something goes horribly wrong. You may experience boot loops, or stuck boot screens in a soft brick scenario, but working your way out of this scenario, while frustrating, can be relatively painless. One only needs to research their device and problem online, and a trove of solutions will turn up.
Hard Brick - If you’re confident that your battery has a good charge, but the only thing you see when you look at your screen is your reflection, then you’ve most likely got a hard bricked device.
Hard bricks occur for many of the same reasons a soft brick occurs, but the device instead just goes lifeless. The software does not interface with the hardware, and for that reason it is next to impossible to recover from this type of scenario without an Emergency Download Mode, or EDL present in the device.
It is important to note that users attempting to de-Google their device, will very likely suffer a brick situation if following the wrong procedure, so please make sure you’ve done your homework before attempting.
Good Luck, and Happy Flashing