How not to get Galaxy Tab into Safe Mode

For weeks my Galaxy Tab 10.1 has reasonably consistently gone into safe mode. Not booting into it but I’d use it fine then put it away and next time I looked at it, Safe Mode was there. It wasn’t every time, but averaged to be about every second time.

So the first thing was a bit of googling to see what this Safe Mode was. Most of the suggestions were around how to put it into safe mode during the boot process but my problem was opposite; it wasn’t during booting and I wanted something to stop safe mode, not put the device into it. The closest I got to it was there was some misbehaving program that kicked the thing into safe mode.

The problem was, I checked several times and there were no running programs. I really did start to worry I had a hardware fault or something wrong deep within the OS.

When you have problems in IT, you’re usually asked “What’s new? What’s changed?”. The answer is generally “Nothing” which gets a switch “No really, what did change”. The only answer I could come up with was a hardware keyboard. This slim aluminum uses bluetooth to communicate to the tablet and clips onto the front screen to protect it when not in use. Could this be the change I was looking for?

The clue was that sometimes when you boot Android, if you hold down some keys it boots into safemode. It seems that holding down some combination of keys (volume up/down, power) puts into safe mode. The keyboard can clip onto the tablet in two ways, one long edge has some raised edges while one doesn’t. If the raised edge was connected to the same side as the buttons, I’d get safe mode sometimes as the edge pushed some of those buttons. More importantly, putting the raised edge on the side with no buttons meant no more safe mode.

Not really a software or electrical fault, more one of just mechanics.