HTC Dream battery life problem,

galapogos · August 19th, 2010, 04:55 AM

Hi,
After I dropped my moto cliq and the touchscreen stopped working, I took over my fiancees Dream while she upgraded to a Desire. Previously she didn't have any battery issues with it, but I noticed after I started using it that battery life was very bad. Just today it went from 85% to 44% in a span of 4hrs doing absolutely nothing with the screen locked. After another 1hr of usage it dropped to 15%, which I'm sure y'all will agree is unacceptable.

I don't have anything running in the background, and I did perform a hardware reset after taking over the phone. The batt doesn't even get hot so I suspect that its not being charged fully or the batt indicator is inaccurate. I do notice that after a reboot I get a few more percentage points on the status indicator.

Does anyone know what's going on? Thanks!

fratermus · August 20th, 2010, 08:24 AM

The Dream has notoriously bad battery life but the indicator can get confused.

Might do a battery recalibration to make sure the phone doesn't make matters any worse. A quick googling will show the step-by-step.

If that's not it eBay has double-size batts/covers for about $10 shipped.

galapogos · August 20th, 2010, 08:37 AM

Thanks, ill try battery calibration. I know the batt life isn't great on the dream nor the cliq I was using, but the phone was previously able to get through a day without issues, unlike now. I tried draining the battery before charging it full again but that didn't seem to help.I did notice that when the batt was flat and I connected the charger and then switched the phone on, after it booted up it showed 21%. I also noticed that the last 1-2% lasts extraordinarily long.

fratermus · August 21st, 2010, 11:43 PM

The last few percent lasting a long time is a symptom of the need for calibration, IIRC. Give it a shot.

Also, if you are running a custom recovery (Amon Ra, etc) you may be able to clear battery stats from there. This may or may not make the calibration better; I'm not an expert in it. You could check in at the xda-developers forum where the hardcore techs reside.

galapogos · August 22nd, 2010, 11:16 AM

Thanks. It seems to help. However I'm still getting the weird problem where my batt life magically gains a few dozen percentage points when I turn on my phone with the charger connected. Just now I turned it off with the batt at 31%. Then I turned it on an hour later while plugging the charger in and when it booted up it showed 84%.