Older variants of Samsung smartphones constrained users to insert the S Pens in only one way, but that changed with the Galaxy Note 5. A number of users complained that it's extremely easy to stick the S Pen the wrong way into the Galaxy Note 5, thus damaging the stylus, the phone, or both.
What appears to be a design flaw of the Galaxy Note 5 allows users to shove the S Pen backwards into its holding bay. If you pull out the S Pen forcefully, you risk breaking the pen detection feature. While this will get your pen unstuck, it will damage an already expensive piece of equipment and render some of its important features useless.
Samsung now sticks warning labels to its devices, hoping that the number of such incidents will decrease.
The YouTube video embedded at the end of this article shows the OEM's warning on a new Galaxy Note 5. The on-screen warning label describes how to correctly position the S Pen, highlighting that proceeding differently "can damage the pen and your phone."
Luckily, numerous users who locked their Samsung styluses in their respective phablets have a quick and safe way to solve the problem.
The solution comes from YouTube channel How2Tech, where you can see how a sheet of paper can be used to bypass the detection sensor, thus allowing the removal of the stuck S-Pen. The procedure is simple and leaves both the phone and stylus perfectly functional.
Here's what you have to do: Take a strip of paper that is about six inches in length and around 0.2 inches in width. Make sure the piece of paper is wide enough to wrap around the upper side of the S-Pen. Give the paper a little curve, like you wanted to make a right angle out of it. Now, curl it around the tip of your pen, which is protruding out from the holding bay. Gently slide the paper up the holding bay, following the length of the S-Pen. When sufficient paper is inside, it will push back the detection sensor, allowing you to smoothly extract the wrongly-inserted stylus.
For a video demonstration, watch the experts at How2Tech do it. It's better to avoid the issue altogether, however, so that's why the Galaxy Note 5 now comes with a warning label as you can see in the unboxing video below.
