My aunt's old, cheap and terrible Samsung phone just died in the most peculiar fashion, so I'm appealing to GAF to see if anyone has an way to resurrect it (she's flat broke and can't afford a new one):
Model number GT-S7273T, apparently a Brazilian operator variant of the Galaxy Ace 3. After a short, but variable amount of time after being turned on, the phone will display a screen full of random pixels for a moment and reboot. It doesn't matter if you use it or not, it will reboot itself in 5 minutes tops.
My first action was to try rushing to the settings and uninstall apps, starting with the Google Now Launcher, which has no business being in such crappy phone. Then the bizarre happened: when the phone inevitably rebooted itself, the app icon was back on the home screen. The same thing happened with any apps I tried to uninstall: the phone would freeze, reboot and they would come back. Also, the phone receives the same WhatsApp messages when it boots if I don't disable wifi quickly enough after the reboot. I soon found out that wifi and any other settings wouldn't stick and would revert back after a reboot.
My second action was to try a factory reset from the recovery menu. Which didn't work: the phone would reboot exactly as it was when it was handed to me. Then I tried using Samsung's Kies software to flash the firmware. Same result. I finally downloaded Odin with a stock firmware image and even checked the dreaded "Nand Erase All" box. Nothing.
My aunt's phone is literally stuck in a groundhog day.
I believe the internal NAND somehow became read-only, since performing actions that result in writes like installing/uninstalling apps are sure fire ways to cause the device to reboot.
Thing is, I'm not very knowledgeable in Android hacking and my attempt at rooting it using SRS failed (rooting by installing an app is obviously not possible), so GAF is my last resort.
