Battery problems, quirks and issues: Read first.

[TaintedsPrincess]

I'm having the same issue. I just got my phone yesterday and charged it all last night. When I took it off the charger this morning it still was not fully charged. I'm going to try and run the battery down as well and charge it again to see if that makes a difference.

 

[satinkzo]

Noticed the same battery quirk, but after my phone gets to 60% it stays there for some time. My phone drops to 80% almost immediately from disconnecting from the charger even if it says fully charged.

 

[Silverexpress]

Ditto here. Maybe it`s a bug with android ver. 1.0-1.5?

 

[ragingbull2k2]

same thing happens to mine... actually, left it charging all night and it was "Fully Charged" in the morning, as soon as I disconnected and then reconnected, it was charging up again for at least another hour or so...

by the way, the screen will stay on while charging unless you hit the red "End" key... don't want our displays on all night now, do we?

Joey

 

[emcube]

unplugged my phone fully charged at 2pm. i've only made one phone call that lasted about 5 min since then and it's 4pm and i'm already down to 50 percent. WTH??? i've had a ppc winmo phone with horrible battery life but this thing is worse. as soon as i unplug this thing from the charger, the battery drops to 80 percent in about 5 mins. only thing that i can think of is the gps icon that constantly sending something on the status bar. it also seems like even when the phone is on sleep, something is constantly running on the background. fyi, i also have taskill downloaded and im contantly closing application but some of the programs keep coming back to life. hopefully, this is caused by some sort of software glitch like the hero's sms issue because if it isn't there is no point of carrying a high powered/full featured phone that is only good for making a few voice calls a day.

 

[stile65]

The GPS icon is most likely because of the Weather Channel widget. If you set it to follow your location, it's constantly checking GPS. They could probably change it to check your location on a user-configurable interval rather than constantly to save battery, but... *shrug*

The indicator is also not completely accurate. Just because your battery's at 50% doesn't mean you're 50% through the time that the phone is usable.

 

[flyjbaker]

Another thing to consider.....

Many times the battery life is a "guess" based upon the current usage at that particular time. IOW, if you are in a poor coverage area, the phone has to turn up the gain on the antenna to achieve reasonable service. Your battery remaining is based upon what is going on with the phone AT THAT MOMENT.

To put it a different way.....

You know the trip computer on your car....if you floor the accelerator you will notice that your instantaneous MPG will be less than 5mpg. But when you lift off the accelerator, then it reads something more realistic. That battery icon is similar and it represents your battery life under those INSTANTANEOUS circumstances/usage. This is why you will see the battery life jump around a bit.

With all that said, I am still not seeing great battery life out of this thing.

 

[satinkzo]

Ok I am typing this on my moment. I am convinced the battery guage is whacked. I have surfing the forum for about 45 minutes with my battery on 5% the whole time and getting a battery warning now and then. My goal is to go until the phone dies then charge it and see how it works tomorrow.

 

[grafix43]

battery life on this thing sucks ass.... mine does the exact same thing... never fully charges... goes from like 80% to 50% within an hr.... and i used the web and nfl mobile live and my battery was at 5% within 1 hr 30 minutes.... what the hell is the point of this phone the battery life is ********

 

[emcube]

i dont think its the weather channel app that's causing this issue because i've deleted the widget from the home screen and replaced it with a shortcut instead. will it still use gps in the background? anyone know if this issue has been addressed??

 

[yohimbe35]

This is a deal breaker with this phone. The battery is not good at all. I had the touch pro and this battery is worse than that phone.
I hope something happens soon, because I only have 9 days left on my return window.
I tried the hero before. I'm loving everything about the phone, but if I can't use it for more than a few hours than it's no good.
I don't understand why they don't test these darn phones out before we get them. I can't believe they didn't realize there was a issue.

 

[abrahan]

i shut the GPS off last night and from what i posted earlier, about it being at 100% charged plugged in and 80% charged when unplugged...

the phone was unplugged at 7:45am this morning and it is 7pm now.

the battery is at 50% right now with normal use all day.
(i made 6 phone calls and sent/replied to about 30 texts and took 10 pictures with auto-upload engaged and checked my email throughout the day all day).
i'll be fine with the battery if this becomes the norm.

 

[abrahan]

This is a deal breaker with this phone. The battery is not good at all. I had the touch pro and this battery is worse than that phone.
I hope something happens soon, because I only have 9 days left on my return window.
I tried the hero before. I'm loving everything about the phone, but if I can't use it for more than a few hours than it's no good.
I don't understand why they don't test these darn phones out before we get them. I can't believe they didn't realize there was a issue.

i know what you mean about the touch pro's battery.
a battery cab totally helped that issue.
i'm hoping someone comes up with something like that for our issue.

 

[satinkzo]

Ok I am typing this on my moment. I am convinced the battery guage is whacked. I have surfing the forum for about 45 minutes with my battery on 5% the whole time and getting a battery warning now and then. My goal is to go until the phone dies then charge it and see how it works tomorrow.

Just to update this earlier post... I went about 40 more minutes with the phone at 5% battery before it finally just flat shut off. I restarted it and got another 10 minutes with the battery at 3% before the phone just shut off for good.

I don't think it's battery life as much as the way the phone is reading the battery levels. I took my phone off charger today before work and talked probably about an hour total, did a few emails (gmail as normal and email app syncs every hour). Ran GPS trying to figure out my GPS bug, probably ran it for 40 minutes or so total, browsed android market and then surfed the forums for at least and hour and 15 minutes tonight before the phone finally ran out juice.

I too had a touch pro, battery life on that was horrid at first or so it seemed. I never let the phone run down to absolutely nothing, well beyond the warnings. I seem to recall no issues though after a couple charge/discharge cycles. I do remember an issue or two after I got the expanded battery from seidio though, the phone didn't seem to calculate properly the extra capacity or however the meter is guaged for a couple days, then it seemed accurate.

 

[jaywku]

Same problem as everyone else. Within about 20 minutes of pulling phone off of the charger I'm down to 80%-70% with no use. Within 6-8 hrs with limited use I'm down to about 15%. I thought I had a bad battery or a bad phone so I exchanged it yesterday and had the same issue with the new phone. I thought that because sprint coverage is not very strong where I live/work that may have been the issue but I guess not since everyone else is having the same problems. I have turned off location services, removed weather.com widget, tried taskiller, tried the sms solutions that the Hero has had and nothing seems to work.

If and update doesn't come out to fix issue I will be taking it back and switching back to the trusty PRE. I REALLY like the phone/ android but this is obviously a deal killer if I can't make it through the day on a single charge. I hope it's addressed. By the way I called Sprint today to find out if it's a known issue and at this point it was not in the database as a "known issue"

 

[billbunton]

i dont think its the weather channel app that's causing this issue because i've deleted the widget from the home screen and replaced it with a shortcut instead. will it still use gps in the background? anyone know if this issue has been addressed??

TWC is certainly part of it. It starts at boot and starts using the GPS to locate you. I've found no way within TWC to tell it not to locate. It does this even without ever running the app or the widget (using Spare Parts to verify what's using the GPS). I tried rebooting and immediately using ATK to kill TWC, and it still wouldn't actually die until it got a GPS fix (which was very slow, since I was indoors at work).

 

[droid26]

how do we get sprint or samsung to know of this issue?

 

[jaywku]

how do we get sprint or samsung to know of this issue?

Keep calling Sprint and once they get enough complaints it becomes a known issue. Then they will put their heads together with Samsung and hopefully fix it. I'm a manager at a Best Buy Mobile and I have sent the problem up my chain which I hope will speed things along.

 

[indiana jones]

the battery does not seem to last very long. i wonder if this is the same problem the hero had. would not surprise me. ive installed handcent and configured it just like i had done with the hero. ill get back to you guys tom. to see how much the battery has drained over night.

 

[abrahan]

the phone was unplugged at 7:45am this morning and it is 7pm now.

the battery is at 50% right now with normal use all day.

ummm, 33 mins later... with no usage...

the battery now says its at 30%

 

[abrahan]

ummm, 33 mins later... with no usage...

the battery now says its at 30%

about 30 more minutes later...

15% still haven't used it and the screen is off.

 

[emcube]

i've tried to uninstall the weather channel app and i was only able to uninstall the updated part of the app. when i went back to uninstall the native app that came with the phone, there was no uninstall button available. is there anyway we can uninstall the original version of the weather channel app that came preinstalled on this phone??

 

[revtime]

For what its worth guys the Samsung Instinct HD had this exact same issue for the short time I had it. Pull it off the charger and it would read 80%. It would seem to stabilize at around 50% but it still drained very fast. Sprint fixed this with an update so maybe its a Samsung thing.......Just throwin it out there.

 

[jaywku]

Download "Battery Graph" from the app store. It gives you a visual of your battery usage and charging.

 

[Edaze55]

about 30 more minutes later...

15% still haven't used it and the screen is off.

My guess is you have background apps running. Yes the battery life is bad. Im not questioning that one bit, but your drain seems to be way faster than what I have noticed.