Re: Rookie mistake
Not quite: you still need to keep some physical buttons pressed in while powering up to get the phone into recovery mode, unless of course it's an Apple device in which case you're SOL. The reason for this is quite simple: the SoC won't know that you want it to go into recovery mode unless you tell it, and to do that via the touchscreen would require the device to boot up first - so if the reason you want to enter recovery mode is that it won't boot... Physical buttons by contrast are connected (more or less) straight to the SoC's GPIO pins and can therefore be read by its low-level firmware prior to booting.