do I have hardware or software trouble?

an emerson756 eight inch diam. tablet loaded by southern telecom with an android phone OS

Was watching youtube on a hot night, when tablet suddenly announced powering down' and ever since, has refused to boot up. I get the emerson logo, the circling 'loading' icon, i count to past 1 minute, and either the screen goes black, or if it makes it any farther, before my security swipe to unlock can appear, it gives me an upside-down dialog box saying powering off'' and shuts off!

The back felt hot when this first happened, so i thought the ambient room temp was just too high, and i waited till it cooled down. Same result. Then i laid it on a gelpad i cooled to 40°F in the fridge, to be certain that heat was not what was triggering the immediate powering off. Still, same results.

I tried a hard reset, using a paperclip in the reset hole. Same result.

I used a tech trick a kid showed me to get into deeper developer's menus by holding down the power button and volume up and down buttons all togetther. Cursored to 'clear cache', then clicked on 'reboot', and still hit the same result:

Power button leads to emerson splash screen, then the circling icon for 'loading in progress' appears, i count off the seconds, hoping for the security swipe screen to appear, which ought to lead to my homescreen with wallpaper and all my home icons---but i haven't been able to get beyond this upside down box insistently powering off before the wifi can connect me!

I don't know if this is the result of the high background temps the last day i could use it? Or if a momentary power blaxkout we had (and it was truly only a moment, not even two seconds) --but none of my other electronics are misbehaving since that blip -- or could i have messed up the bootup process some otther way?

Does this sound like heat-frying to you? Or the power drop tripped it somehow? I can't even get far enough 'in' to see my battery icon -- but it's got enuf power to 'circle' for over a minute before it either goes black, or gives me that upside down 'powering off' box.

WTF, man??

I took my sd card out of it and i haven't yet resorted to the developer's factory wpe by using the power, volume up, volume down method. I'm hoping it can still be restored without that drastic move. I wish i had told google to back up my data before this happened. I don't think i can get to it to even move it, now.

So, does this sound like it's hardware, or software, to you? And how could i test to tell?

Janet in new mexico

m e n s a b r a i n s at gee mayle dott commm