Acer Iconia A500 Sleep of Death and How I Fixed Mine

First off, this is not meant to be a guide. Do your research before you do anything to your tablet. Realize that by changing your tablet from its manufacturer state, it is possible to brick your tablet, from which you will be left with an expensive doorstop. By reading any further, you agree that I will not be held responsible for your bricked or damaged device.

 So, now that you understand the risks involved in modifying your tablet, I will get my explanation of what I did underway. First off, just to restate the obvious, in this article I am talking about the Acer Iconia A500.

If you are like me, after waiting for what seemed like forever, Acer finally released Ice Cream Sandwich, but upon installing it, you found that if you left your tablet for a while, it would become unresponsive, leaving you no choice but to hold the button in for around 15 seconds to hard-power it off and then start it up again. If you aren't aware already, this problem is called the 'Sleep of Death' problem, or just SoD for short.

There are various ways of artificially fixing this problem (by keeping your tablet from falling into a sleep mode), such as with Wakelock or Wake my Android Pro. I did not try Wakelock, but Wake my Android Pro did not work for me. While Wakelock will probably do the job, one downside is that you will take a hit in your battery life, as the tablet is prevented from entering a deep sleep.

Like a lot of people I've read about, I needed my tablet on a daily basis and could not afford to part with it, so I ignored sending it in for warranty, and this month discovered that I had waited too long, and that the warranty had ran out. If you are having the sleep of death problem and still have warranty on your tablet, I would recommend you call Acer Support and deal with them. Some people recommend putting a little note with the tablet when you send it in saying that it is experiencing the Sleep of Death problem.

So, for me, now that I had no official recourse to fix my tablet, I decided to turn to the unofficial development scene. Xda-Developers has been indispensable on my journey to fix my tablet. I would recommend you do your reading there to learn about the proper procedures to follow when modifying your tablet. 

Note: I am trying to recall all the steps I took in fixing my tablet, but I may miss a few that I took on my journey. Do not use this as a step-by-step guide. Use it as a reference to help you understand what to expect.

You will need your Acer USB drivers installed to be able to do any of the things below. See http://support.acer.com for the USB drivers.

Now onto what I did to fix my tablet:
1. First I rooted my tablet using a very nice tool created by blackthund3r. You can read about it and find a link to it here. I simply had my tablet connected to my computer in usb debugging mode (turned on), opened up the program, and clicked the Do It! button (note, rooting your tablet, unless you change it back, can be considered voiding your warranty). The root went fine, and it installed some useful apps to the tablet.

2. Next, and this is very important, you must obtain your CPUID. From this, you can generate an SBK for which you will use later. In case something goes seriously wrong, I am told you will need this saved. Then, in my case, I ended up flashing an Ice Cream Sandwich bootloader (V8 Thor's to be exact). All the steps to do the above are outlined very nicely in this guide. Read it over as many times as it takes until you feel fairly comfortable in the steps. I did Option 2, but Option 1, using AfterOTA, looks like it would work, but as it says, you must have never made changes to your tablet before, and are on the Ice Cream Sandwich update that you downloaded from ACER (the Over-the-air one, that you got from a system update). If you follow that guide, on step 4, it says to choose an ICS rom to use. I used one from here, the 4.0.4-RE-FLEXxx_Rev5.2-public rom. It includes a kernel that overclocks your tablet to 1.5 GHZ, so if you don't feel comfortable with using that, use one of the other roms on that list. After you have all the things downloaded and transferred to your SD Card that it said, I used the Automated flashing Tool steps, and not the manual flashing method.

3. When you have completed those steps, you will find that your tablet has become quite different (I think for the better). But sadly, if you are like me, you will find that you still have the Sleep of Death problem. It took me a while, but I finally fixed it by flashing ezterry's kernel. I have been up and running for over 5 days now, and I haven't had a problem. The FLEX Rom I used is very awesome, and I am no longer dreading my purchase of the Acer tablet.

Please note: This is a simplification of the steps I took. I did a lot of stupid things trying to fix the issue, including flashing back to a stock rom, from which something could have contributed to the fix. But I don't believe this to be the case, because when I went back to FLEX, I was still getting the SoD's. I tried many kernels, but it was only after flashing ezterry's kernel that my problem became solved.

If you have this problem, I hope my giant spiel of what I did helps lead you in the right direction. I know how frustrating it is to have a tablet that doesn't want to stay on. When in doubt (but only after doing your own research), ask in the forums at XDA-Developer.com. Make sure to post in the Q and A part and not in another section. I have nothing but awesome things to say about the people there, and really hope you can manage to fix your tablet as I did. Good luck.  


TOOLS AND THINGS I FOUND USEFUL:
- ICS Root 7.1.1 
- AfterOTA 
- APX_v0.4A-flashTool-500Manager1.0.2 (can be found here)
- 4.0.4-RE-FLEXxx_Rev5.2-public
- ezterry A500 Kernel  

The Light in the Night

While reading my June 30th copy of New Scientist, I came across an interesting article (Better than Sunshine by Jeff Hecht) on the effects that artificial light has on us, as well as the effects it has on the animals around us. To sum it up very quickly, our current artificial light is not entirely beneficial to our lives. By using LEDs, in the future, light bulbs may be made that can change over time, providing different compositions of colors in our light at different times of day, helping to improve our energy levels and sleeping habits (by mimicking the behavior of the Sun). I'm not going to go into it, but a quick Google search brought up many research papers using these kinds of lights already.

While I was searching around though, I found a program called f.lux, which is a neat little app that changes your screen color throughout the day according to where the sun is. Obviously, such a program would be bad for someone who is a digital artist, but for someone like me, who spends a lot of time at the computer reading and working on things that don't depend on exact colors, its a nifty little app. During the evening, you really start to notice the screen's changes, although it does not affect the usability.

If you're the sort of person who uses their computer all day, it couldn't hurt to check it out. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

f.lux