Help Mobile Network Signal draining battery in 2 hrs, horribly hot phone

[vnkotak]

Hi,

My Nexus 5 mobile started behaving weird since past 3 days after Marshmallow (Android 6) update. It was working perfectly fine in Lollilop, so not sure if its a Marshmallow problem or actually accidentally I had dropped it just after the update, so its some internal damage due to the drop.

Problem is that phone is not detecting mobile network signal at all. It is empty triangle at the top bar. Hence, phone continuously trying to look for Network Signal, due to this mobile network drains all the battery in around 2 hrs. Yes, not lasting more than 2 hrs. Also, I tried to remove the SIM from the phone, still it continuously looks for network signal and drains the battery, which I am surprised that without sim why should phone look for mobile network. Also due to this, phone gets HORRIBLY HOT so much that you can toast a bread on it. Yes, I am not lying, it does get that damn hot.

However, surprisingly, if I keep the phone in Airplane mode, then battery doesn't drain and last almost full day on Wifi.

Has anyone seen similar issue? As phone works fine in Airplane mode, so not sure if it's Software problem or Hardware problem of any ic.

I went to local repair guy and he did a quick check by opening the phone and verifying few things, and he says the hardware like network ic looks ok.

Please help. I am unable to use the phone and can only use on Wifi.

 

[Hadron]

I'm not surprised that it doesn't do that in airplane mode, because that turns off the cellular radios. Without a SIM? Well, I guess it ought to still be able to make emergency calls, so it's not crazy that it tries to find a network, but I'm surprised it doesn't give up after a while.

Was there any interruption during the update? And did you see it work after the update before you dropped it, or did you not get that chance?

It's not so uncommon to have some problems after a major update, for which we'd normally recommend a backup and factory reset. However, those are normally at the level of performance glitches rather than something as extreme as this. But as far as software fixes go, that's one of the two obvious options, the other being to download a factory image and flash that (i.e. reinstall the phone's software). I don't own a Nexus, so haven't done this myself, but since the instructions there say that this will wipe the phone anyway then (a) you want to make a backup of anything important either way, and (b) you may as well try the factory reset by itself before you try the factory image.

It might be that people more familiar with this device would have other ideas. We can move the thread to our Nexus 5 forum if you'd like?

What I will say is that if even flashing a factory image doesn't fix it then it probably is a hardware problem.

 

[wpcprez]

this is almost always the phone looking for signal and killing the battery. The radio kills the battery almost as quickly as the cpu does when playing games. Imagine playing a game on your phone 24/7 when the phone is searching and searching