How to Solve Unlock Screen Problem on Lenovo S880

Feb 18, 2013

Yesterday, I was given a difficult task by my sister asking me to reset her newly bought ICS powered Lenovo S880. After asking some few questions, I found out that her son mistakenly used different pattern for the unlock screen that leads to ‘disabling’ the smartphone after numerous failed attempts. To solve the problem, a Gmail account is needed to reset the unlock pattern so an Internet connection is needed. But unfortunately, the connection settings are not yet configured for data connection so resetting the unlock screen via this method is not possible. To make it worst, the WiFi radio is not enabled so it seems that there’s nothing hope left to solve the problem.

In this type of situation, I get the feeling of being challenged to push myself harder to go beyond my limits. So I fire up my Chrome browser to start ‘googling’ the solution to the problem. As usual there are plenty of options available like rooting the Lenovo S880 and altering the WiFi settings, flashing the smartphone with a new ROM, performing a hard/soft reset on the Lenovo S880 etc. After reading and assessing which method is applicable, I found out that flashing the smartphone and performing a hard/soft reset were the only possible solution. Which one should I use?

To be safe and make sure that the steps involve will not void the warranty of the newly bought Lenovo S880, I prefer performing a hard/soft reset on the smartphone. Once again, I started to look for Lenovo S880 reset code that I can use. But after spending about an hour looking for the reset code or instructions specific for Lenovo S880, I finally gave up. It seems that there’s no online content that could help me solve this problem.

I rest for a while then I decided to give my last shot. This time I tried searching for hard/soft resetting of any smartphone and tablet. Luckily I found out that you can put a smartphone or tablet into factory mode by pressing the ‘Volume Down’ button and the ‘Power’ button. After shutting down the phone, I tried this on the Lenovo S880 and it work. But there’s nothing that you can do after doing this trick. Remember that we’re looking for some kind of a menu from which we can ‘reset’ the phone. With the Lenovo S880, the Power buttons and the Volume Up and Volume Down buttons are the only option that we had. Yes, that’s it. Maybe the Volume Up button is the final piece to the equation.

So after doing the first trick of putting the Lenovo S880 into safe mode (or meta mode?), I tried pressing the Volume Up button. But it’s not working. This time I tried pressing the Power button and the Volume Up button and to my surprise a menu suddenly appears. It’s the Factory Mode screen menu of the Lenovo S880!

To cut it short, you should choose ‘Clear eMMC’ to reset your Lenovo S880. You can do this by pressing the Volume Up button to navigate the menu. After choosing the ‘Clear eMMC’ option, press the Volume Down button to perform software reset on the Lenovo S880. It will be quick and short erasing the internal memory of your smartphone and will reboot automatically. After the reboot, the annoying ‘locked’ unlock screen will disappear.

As luck would have it, problem is now solved. To document the solution, I tried doing the procedure again and it seems that either pressing the Volume Up button or combining it with the Power button will do the trick of launching the Factory Mode menu screen. Maybe I’m wrong about this so if you know something about this you can shoot me an email so that I can update this post. Have a nice day!

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