Here’s something interesting. Samsung’s Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 have had quite a few bugs since their release in 2012. There was that browser bug that could allow any webpage to factory reset your device. Then the Exynos exploit that any app could use to root your device and access the physical memory. Now there’s a new one that has to do with copying and pasting on the Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note 2 and a bunch of other Touchwiz devices. Samsung device owners are reporting that if you sue the feature a certain number of times the phone or tablet crashes and reboots. What’s worse is that devices affected by this bug require a factory reset to properly copy/paste again.
Now this issue isn’t present on every device, but it is related to Touchwiz (why can’t OEM’s just use Stock Android? less problems). There are also reports that it affects all Samsung devices running Android 3.0-4.1, which is a good number of them. So it looks like despite the number of updates to Touchwiz, Samsung still has not fixed the problem. You can check out the video below from a user on Samsung’s developer forums, that demonstrates the crash.
This bug isn’t just limited to text either. It also affects the camera and the gallery. Earlier today, The Next Web wrote about this bug and Samsung gave them an update about the issue:
“We would like to assure our customers that this issue can only occur in extremely rare circumstances. Furthermore, this issue can be easily and quickly prevented through a regular Over-The-Air (OTA) software update which began rolling out last year.”
So it looks like Samsung has attempted to fix this issue. But if you are paranoid about this bug, or have experienced the bug, the best thing to do is to flash an AOSP ROM like CyanogenMod or AOKP. That will get rid of it completely, since it’s a Touchwiz problem.
Have any of you experienced this strange bug? Let us know in the comments below.