Help HTC One M9 battery is dying...almost dead

[miamicuse]

I purchased two brand new in box Not refurbished HTC One M9 (T-Mobile) from Amazon in May of 2017. My carrier is Simple Mobile which is a MVNO of T-Mobile. One phone is for my use and the other for my son. My previous device was a HTC One M7.

Right out of the box the battery performance was a bit disappointing. My M7 could last a whole day but the M9 lasts about 4-5 hours max on moderate usage which is mostly browsing, calls, text, whatsapp.

Within three months the battery went from last 4-5 hours to only 2 hours. Basically, any time the battery indicator reaches 40% its an immediate death.

This gets progressively worse and worse. At this moment, eight months after initial purchase, the phone will die when it reaches 82% power. This translates into about 20 minutes of usages per full charge.

I have contacted HTC by email twice since the phone is still supposedly under the original 1 year warranty, but no response from HTC. However when I go to one of those IMEI checker and typed mine in, it shows the warranty period is over, and was over BEFORE I even made the purchase.

While I have been struggling with this, my son's phone - identical model, identical carrier, seems to run fine. He gets about six hours out of it, so the theory is my particular device may be defective. Then last week, out of the blue, he told me his phone shuts down suddenly at 30% for no reason, and on powering back up it shows 4% battery. So it seems his phone is having the early stage of the same issue, only it's not as bad as mine, YET.

When the phone gets it's sudden death and when it does come back, half the time it will remove all the widgets I have on the screen.

I have the stock phone, that came with Android version 7.0, security patch level 2-1-2017, software number 4.27.531.6.

I have done a few things so far to get some clarity of the problem.

(1) I have tried charging it with the phone on vs phone off, didn't make a difference.
(2) I have rebooted to safe mode, and it appears the battery drain (which runs about 1+% a minute with no active usage) is the same.
(3) I have tried the battery recaliberation steps by powering off then holding the volume up + down + power buttons for two minutes plus and that didn't seem to make any difference, although the instructions said to turn off "fast boot" which on my phone under Power settings > Battery I do not have such an option.
(3) I have wiped the partition cache when the battery was fully charged at 100%, and after the partition charge the phone reboots to 73%. Not sure I understand what happened here, unless the actual process to wipe the partition cache drained 27% of the battery. I then recharged it to 100%, and the problem persists. Super quick drain, and shuts down once reached 80%, Basically, once it reaches 80% battery level, it shuts down, if you then plug in the charger, the battery says 0%.

I contemplated ordering a new M9 battery, but looking at the youtube video on the process, I am not at all confident that I can do it without damaging the phone itself.

I have to admit, I have not been careful to always use the OEM HTC charger and cable. I have been using HTC for a long time, and have the older charger from S1, M7, M8, various charging cables from an assortment of power banks, and didn't think twice about always charging with original cable and charger. Also, I typically leave the phone charging overnight when I go to bed. My car has a few USB ports and at times I would plug that into my car's USB port to charge if battery level is low. I have a few receptacles in the office with those USB sockets, and again I plug in to charge, not even sure what output amps and voltages of those are. I never had to charge while driving or in the office for older HTC phones as they last the whole day, the M9 I was charging in mid day and more and more. Looking at the charger I used the most it says the output is 5V 1.8A. I know my son uses the OEM charger most of the time.

The questions I have are:
(A) Does this seem like a software issue or hardware issue? Could my charging it with non M9 chargers damaged something?
(B) Is it a waste of time to continue to pursue with HTC a warranty claim to try and get my phone (and possibly my son's phone if it continues to degrade) serviced?
(C) Should I try to swap out a new battery? By myself or by a local phone repair shop? I am fairly handy but the process involved prying teasing loose some glued on parts that just doesn't seem it was designed to be serviced.

Thanks in advance for any comment.

 

[Hadron]

The first thing to clarify: did you buy it from Amazon themselves, or from a reseller using Amazon marketplace? And how is the IMEI checker telling you that the 1 year warranty is over? If it's just using the production date then that's not the answer: if the phone is sold as new then the warranty would start from when it was sold to you, not from when it was made. However, if the service you used was able to check the actual original purchase date and so the real warranty expiry that would imply that you were mis-sold: the phone was not really new in the first place. If this is the case you would have a case against the seller, and perhaps it's worth contacting Amazon if a third-party seller is mis-selling products (I'm assuming here that it was a reseller using Amazon, rather than Amazon themselves; I'd be amazed if they were stupid enough to pull a stunt like that). In any event, if the phones are really second hand and were originally sold more than a year ago then HTC do not owe you any warranty on them. Your case would be with the person or company who sold them.

Another reason I suspect they are second-hand is that you are describing the behaviour of a battery that has been used heavily. Yes, the latest an M9 will have been manufacturerd would be early 2016, so the phone would have been at least a year old by the time you bought it, but this sounds a lot worse than I'd expect just from the battery being stored without use for a year.

As for your questions:

a) this sounds like hardware. And while I can't definitively rule out the charger, unless you have something really shoddy there I don't think that's the problem: it's the phone that controls the charging, not the charger, and in my household we use a mix of chargers from different phone & tablet models plus a couple of Anker chargers (a reputable third party supplier) without problems. And my daughter has an M9, and she's the person who is most likely to use whatever charger is nearest.

b) I expect you can get it serviced by HTC, or even the battery replaced. But it will only be a warranty repair if the phone genuinely was new when sold to you.

c) At your own risk. I'd check that a local repairer is competent to do the work before handing over, and that they'll warrant their work (so they can't just botch it and leave you out of pocket and with a defective phone).

 

[tommo47]

My wife has an M7 purchased in May 2013 and I have an M9 purchased in May 2015. The M7 started with exactly the same symptoms as you've described about June this year followed somewhat disappointingly by the M9 a few months later. Our short term answer was to keep them permanently on charge which isn't a problem whilst at home and was resolved by using battery packs whilst out and about. It has worked reasonably well but does detract considerably from the concept of a 'mobile phone' and can sometimes, for obvious reasons, be quite inconvenient.

I can't help but recall the late 70s/early 80s and using mobile telephones as a Post Office Engineer on private circuit maintenance in remote areas of North Wales - oh happy days .



As the M7 and M9 are working perfectly as long as they are being charged we have decided to keep them and have bought two HTC 10s for the conventional 'mobile' use.

It might seem extravagant but the benefits are:-

1) Avoided the inconvenience and cost of having the M7 and M9 repaired, which is apparently quite expensive for the M7.

2) Hopefully a much longer life span for the 10s as they will be going through what is deemed to be the best charge cycle ie. charged overnight whilst not being used and remaining in standby mode as much as possible between charges.

The M7 and M9 are, and always have been, used extensively at home for browsing, on line banking, schpock, whatsapp, playing music etc, etc, whilst having to be kept on charge to make sure they are always ready for 'mobile' use and, again hopefully, will continue to be so used for some time to come.

One huge benefit for me is my regular use of navigation apps for my hill walking, specifically OsmAnd+, where carrying a permanently connected battery pack is not in the least bit inconvenient, and I now have a fully charged back up device.

Incidentally, both the M7 and M9 exhibited these symptoms despite having used the chargers/cables supplied with them for 100% of the time so I don't think your use of other chargers/cables has had a particularly detrimental affect on the battery.

 

[today]

Having a battery go to zero is devastating to its future performance. My m8 fell into that situation as it would just shutdown when taxed below 40 percent and sometimes reset. My new phone has a user replaceable battery.

 

[Hadron]

Deeply discharging a lithium cell would be disastrous, which is why "zero" on the battery gauge is not truly zero, i.e. the phone shuts down before that happens. It's still not a good idea to do it if you can avoid it, since doing this regularly will reduce battery longevity. But simply running the phone to the point where the meter says zero and it shuts down does not instantly wreck the battery, which your post could be read as saying (just putting that out there for others who might find this thread).

 

[svim]

The questions I have are:
(A) Does this seem like a software issue or hardware issue? Could my charging it with non M9 chargers damaged something?
(B) Is it a waste of time to continue to pursue with HTC a warranty claim to try and get my phone (and possibly my son's phone if it continues to degrade) serviced?
(C) Should I try to swap out a new battery? By myself or by a local phone repair shop? I am fairly handy but the process involved prying teasing loose some glued on parts that just doesn't seem it was designed to be serviced.

a) This sounds like a hardware issue to me, specifically the battery itself. I don't know if continuing to apply various software-based fixes is worth the effort.
b) Where did you buy this phone? Directly from HTC, or from Simple Mobile, or from some other retailer? If from other than manufacturer you might want to focus on the seller. Make sure you have all your documentation on hand, they could question you about the timeline. You initially stated this was purchased new, meaning it was sitting in storage for a good year or so. A lithium-ion battery left that long, completely idle, without being charged at least once every few months will degrade faster than normal. This site has a lot of reliable info and batteries in general:
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_store_batteries
c) If you haven't disassembled smartphones before and don't already have all the necessary tools, approach a project like this very carefully. Apparently HTC really embedded the battery internally and it won't be a simple task to either remove it or put your phone back together again. Take a look at this link on a M9 teardown:
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/HTC+One+M9+Teardown/39166
Again, just be careful and methodical. A smartphone battery is prone to bursting if you inadvertently puncture it, and this one looks like it'll need some coaxing to remove. Some models are designed with user-replaceable batteries, this isn't one of them.
If you opt to have a local shop replace the battery, be sure to back up everything before dropping it off.

 

[miamicuse]

Thanks for the comments so far. I wanted to add some comments about the original purchase.

The phone's listed condition was NEW when I bought it.

It was "Sold By" a company called "Mobile Market LLC", but "Fulfilled By" Amazon. Actually I contacted Mobile Market LLC before the purchase to ask whether it was a brand new in box phone that comes with all OEM accessories and they said yes, and that they ship hundreds of these phones to Amazon who does the fulfillment.

On receipt of the phone it came with all the accessories in sealed bags that I have to rip open. The phone also in a sealed bag and screen cover and a few OEM tapes across the edges, all indications seem to suggest it was brand new.

But if I use one of those IMEI checker and type the IMEI number in I get this:

Part Description SKU , TMUS , English-WWE , USA , W/SIM card , Bootloader Lock , Silver/Golden , DEF00 , w/SIM Lock , HIMA#UL_TMUS-O6
Customer Description T-MOBILE USA
Country USA
Warranty start 2015/03/28
Warranty end 2016/06/28

I am not sure how they know when a phone was sold...but I bought the phone in May 2017, almost a year AFTER the supposedly warranty expired. Unless these IMEI checkers are not reliable on the warranty dates?

HTC has been totally unresponsive to my email inquiry for support.

 

[Hadron]

I just tried my old phone's IMEI in one of those sites (imei24.com). Unfortunately the warranty information was too imprecise to be absolutely sure what it knows, though I think I can guess: they showed it starting about a month before I bought it and ending 2 months after it really would have, which makes me suspect it was based on when they shipped it to the company who sold it to me rather than when I bought it (which is when legally the warranty actually starts). It did correctly identify the company who I bought it from.

So it's possible that if they sold it to T-Mobile, and Mobile Market LLC bought unsold stock from them to sell on, that it is a "new" phone (albeit 2 years old) and the warranty information is just a guess based on when first sold to T-Mobile. I've never dealt with HTC US (I'm British) so have no experience of them (the UK operation have been fine in my experience, but that doesn't help you), but I would persist with that. Maybe find a customer services phone number and speak to someone.