My Google Nexus 7 had a weird fault earlier, its screen wouldn’t come on – just what you need before a nine hour flight. I tried a reset – it appeared to be caught in a loop with some static displayed on screen. I thought I might remove the back cover, disconnect the battery and take it from there.
Glad I did – the battery connector wasn’t engaged properly. A piece of insulating material had got in the way, preventing the connector locking in place. It must have worked loose.
Since then I’ve seen a few threads on Reddit with people mentioning that disconnecting and reconnecting the battery had fixed the same issue. I wonder if this is something more common than I thought?