Help Charging Issues

[spooky_b329]

My Nexus 4 is a couple of months old but is not coping well with in car charging.

I am using the same two chargers as I did with my old HTC Desire, the Desire would happily sit charging at 1amp (AC) whilst it ran a blackbox recorder app, Dailyroads Voyager. If I wanted it would also cope with streaming spotify and using Google sat nav at the same time. Running these three power hungry apps for an hour would see the phone charge decrease to around 10% but the charger would hold it there and the phone would cope.

With the Nexus 4, it struggles to maintain any real charge when using just Dailyroads, after three to four hours of driving it will be struggling and will normally turn off a few minutes after unplugging. Using Spotify at the same time is pretty hopeless. It normally shows AC but when the battery is going flat it often changes to USB.

Does it detect AC/USB in the same way as the desire? (Shorted data pins) If I get a 2 amp charger can it take advantag of the extra power available or will it limit itself to 1 amp?

On another note, I'm also having trouble with the sat nav regularly dropping out, and it gets pretty laggy, taking a while to catch up when you make a turn.

Thanks for any help!

 

[SiempreTuna]

I have a similar issue with in-car charging: the problem is that 1 amp ain't enough. If you look at the standard wall charger you'll see its rated at 1.2 amps. Unfortunately, I haven't managed to find a car charger rated 1.2 amps

I guess a 2 amp charger would be OK, though I'd be a tad worried about the extra 0.8 amps possibly doing some damage - maybe someone in the know could advise about that ..?

Re the lag/drop out: I use Google Maps and I find the location fix is often a little behind my actual location, but not normally enough to cause a problem. Apart from the odd issue, I haven't had routing drop out much.

Are you sure you have aGPS enabled? Is the phone running anything else other than navigation? When I have had routing drop out or struggle to get started, re-booting the phone has generally fixed the problem (I know Android is supposed to manage resources perfectly now, but - sorry, Android fans - sometimes it just doesn't. Probably something to do with poorly coded 3rd party apps).

 

[Harry2]

You might have a look at the N4's temperature of the battery while charging and navigation in the car. The phone's charging control will shut down the charging when the battery's temperature reachs 45C/113F until the battery meets the charging operating range again.
Mounting the phone above the car's air vents could help.

If there isn't a heat problem you'd try HTC's double car charger HTC CC300.
It supplies 2 amps, so if you are using only one of charger's two outputs the N4 could draw its full 1.2 amps

Harry