Database Users

Strange battery issues

I'm running a Sprint Mogul using no2chem's nueROM 2.2 Preview 7 (8's touchscreen issues made me downgrade), and having some very peculiar battery problems I'm hoping someone has advice about.
A few weeks ago I woke up, pulled my phone from the charger, and watched the battery instantly drop from 100% to around 83%. Over the next 15 minutes it dropped to the mid-70s before leveling out and discharging at a more normal rate. This occurred the next day and so on. Now this was with Seidio's 3200mAh extended battery. I then switched to my (sigh) OEM battery and didn't have the same problem, so assumed it was Seidio's battery, filled out an RMA, and sent it off to be repaired.
Now a couple of days ago the OEM battery started doing the same thing. I'd pull it off the charge and it would have somewhere in the range of 60% battery remaining. I'd have to plug it into my car charger or USB cable on my notebook to charge it up the rest of the way (albeit very slowly).
This morning I decided to watch the process from before I even unplugged it. First I noticed the orange light was on after a full night's charge. If memory serves me, the light's supposed to go out when it's at 100% (I may be mistaken). Meanwhile the battery meter was at 60%. I unplugged it and it remained there. I plugged it back in and watched no2chem's charge meter show the power connection, and I went ahead and left it plugged in for a little while before checking it again. It was now at 63%.
So what I'm finding is that at some point during the night my phone stops accepting a charge, despite the charge light remaining on.
I'm going to experiment with two things to further troubleshoot: tonight I'm swapping chargers with my wife's. I'm pretty sure the phone controls whether or not it's continuing to charge the battery, but I'm going to rule this out the only way I can. Then if that doesn't improve it I'm going to flash back to a Sprint official ROM (sigh) and see if maybe no2chem's power applet or power management settings are somehow causing this oddity.
Does anyone have any extra experiences with problems like this that might give me an idea of what else to try? Otherwise my thinking is if those two steps yield no improvements, then it's the phone's physical battery management hardware that's faulty and I'm going to have to use my insurance to replace the phone. I'd like to exhaust all the other resources before I spend the $50 on the deductible, though.
Thanks!

sometimes mine overheats while charging, at that point the LED flashes orange until it cools down enough to resume charging, this might be happening to your in the middle of the night

I thought I heard purple meant overheating. Either way, it's not clearly describing it. Also this has never happened before, so if it's happening every single night now, I've definitely got a problem.
Anyway, just plugged it in with my wife's charger. Let's see how it turns out in the morning.

You said :
"I'd have to plug it into my car charger or USB cable on my notebook to charge it up the rest of the way (albeit very slowly)."
Sure sounds like a bad charger.

worwig said:
Sure sounds like a bad charger.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Now confirmed. Just pulled it off my wife's charger after a full night, at 100%. Five minutes later, 99%. Much better. I wonder what would cause the charger to stop charging halfway through the night, but keep the charge light on. Well, at least the mystery's been solved.

I am sort of having the same issue. A couple of weeks ago I decided to upgrade from the standard Verizon ROM for my xv6800 to DCD's 3.2.2 ROM. The upgrade went perfectly. I always plug in my phone every night before I go to bed. The light turns orange while it is charging and then it is green when I wake up. The phone always showed 100%. Now with the updated ROM, I do the same, plug in before I go to bed, the light turns orange, and it is green when I wake up. But, when I look at the battery level when I unplug it, it is usually at about 94%. The battery level also seems to go down quicker than before, but I figured that had to do with the GPS radio and WM6.1. Why do you think the battery would no longer show 100% when I unplug it? Seems very weird that right after I upgrade the ROM my battery would start failing.

jeffgman said:
I am sort of having the same issue. A couple of weeks ago I decided to upgrade from the standard Verizon ROM for my xv6800 to DCD's 3.2.2 ROM. The upgrade went perfectly. I always plug in my phone every night before I go to bed. The light turns orange while it is charging and then it is green when I wake up. The phone always showed 100%. Now with the updated ROM, I do the same, plug in before I go to bed, the light turns orange, and it is green when I wake up. But, when I look at the battery level when I unplug it, it is usually at about 94%. The battery level also seems to go down quicker than before, but I figured that had to do with the GPS radio and WM6.1. Why do you think the battery would no longer show 100% when I unplug it? Seems very weird that right after I upgrade the ROM my battery would start failing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
DCD roms included new code to show 1% changes. The original code showed 10% changes only. Originally, you likely saw 100%, 90%, 80% etc. Now you see 95%, 94%, 93%, etc. It seldom goes to a perfect 100% and it LOOKS like it is discharging faster. In reality it is simply showing more detail.

worwig said:
DCD roms included new code to show 1% changes. The original code showed 10% changes only. Originally, you likely saw 100%, 90%, 80% etc. Now you see 95%, 94%, 93%, etc. It seldom goes to a perfect 100% and it LOOKS like it is discharging faster. In reality it is simply showing more detail.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, I noticed the 1% increments, I figured it was Windows Mobile 6.1 compared to 6.0. I think the old method was reporting in 5% blocks.
So, your battery never shows 100%? Very weird. So, my battery is probably fine and it is probably behaving just like it always has?
Thanks for the information.

initial battery depletion

I haven't really found much else on this. But when I take my battery off the charger it goes down to 93 or so percent in just a few minutes. Anyone else have this problem

yeah this is an ongoing software issue with this phone, it is discussed in here somewhere. the fix for now is to once it is charged turn the phone off, then pug it it and it will charge again for about 15-30 minutes, you can do it a few times if you want but I havent personally seen a difference by doing it one or three times.

I don't think it is a bug.
The phone stops charging when full. So if you plug it in and go to bed it will stop after awhile, but continue to use juice as it normally does - unless it is turned off.
Doesn't reset until you unplug and re-plug in or reboot your phone, I believe.

That's what I thought at first too, but I have taken it off the charger immediately after hitting full and it still does it

It is a bug, must be a miss calculation for battery over charging protection.
Phone charges for an extra 30 minutes after it's "full" if you turn it off and continue to charge it.

th3drow said:
That's what I thought at first too, but I have taken it off the charger immediately after hitting full and it still does it
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine doesn't. When the initial charge completes and I plug it right back in, it stays green. Doesn't matter if it is on the car charger or regular charger.

Try what jitajt describes.
Charge it.
Disconnect it.
POWER IT OFF.
Then plug it back in. The charge indicator will be orange. Not green.
Charge til the light is green.
I tried what you described: charge,unplug,plug back in, and the charge indicator stayed green.
Not until you do as jitajt describes, and what is outlined above, will you get a full charge.

just did it, works alot better, it sucks though because it is really time consuming, not something i would be able to do every day.

Yeah.
Maybe one of the near-future OTA updates will include a firmware fix to take care of this.
Hold your breath...

same on the att tilt2, must be an htc thing

[Q] Mytouch 4g died in sleep?

So, this phone was working without any problems but then my wife turned it off and left it in the drawer for about 3 weeks when she went overseas. When she got back and tried to turn it on it wont turn on. We figured it might have drained the battery so we plugged it in but now its not charging either! When I unplugged and plugged in, the LED blinked orange once but now it wont even do that either, no power, no LED, not charging either. I have tired everything, left it disconnected, battery out for an hour, then put it together and tried to charge, still nothing.
Any ideas? It is already out of warranty so talking to T-Mobile is out of question.
Nothing has been done to it, it is physically fine, it was just off for a long period and not it just wont respond.
Edit: Fixed it! I don't know what, I was almost giving up, but I took the battery out and blew hard on the battery contacts in the phone and in the charging port then plugged everything in and put it back on charger, orange light started to blink and then went solid and now its charging. I just turned it on. This phone is dodgy, no other phone hard bricks like this if you leave it off.

Some phones don't function with completely discharged battery. Actually, most of newer phones. You need to leave the battery inside and the phone connected to charger for some time, till the charging light shows up. MT4G is very far from being "dodgy", doesn't differ from many other phones that behave the same, and you were nowhere near "hard brick".
Good luck in powering up Motorola Defy with completely discharged battery.

Recoverable problem
syl0n said:
So, this phone was working without any problems but then my wife turned it off and left it in the drawer for about 3 weeks when she went overseas. When she got back and tried to turn it on it wont turn on. We figured it might have drained the battery so we plugged it in but now its not charging either! When I unplugged and plugged in, the LED blinked orange once but now it wont even do that either, no power, no LED, not charging either. I have tired everything, left it disconnected, battery out for an hour, then put it together and tried to charge, still nothing.
Any ideas? It is already out of warranty so talking to T-Mobile is out of question.
Nothing has been done to it, it is physically fine, it was just off for a long period and not it just wont respond.
Edit: Fixed it! I don't know what, I was almost giving up, but I took the battery out and blew hard on the battery contacts in the phone and in the charging port then plugged everything in and put it back on charger, orange light started to blink and then went solid and now its charging. I just turned it on. This phone is dodgy, no other phone hard bricks like this if you leave it off.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Had a similar problem. Phone died while using it then wouldn't light up when plugged in. Left it plugged in for half an hour wouldn't seem to charge via wall or car charger. Tried doing a hard reset with/without the battery & plugged in/not plugged in in various combinations. Got nuthin. Drove around for hours looking for a replacement or open T-Mobile place, until it got too late and I went home. Live chat with T-mobile rep was a waste of time. Plugged it in the wall and left it, as this once brought back a G2 battery that I thought was cold dead. Five hours later it was lit up and charging, showing 40% charge on the battery indicator app once I turned it back on. "HTC Sense" crashed immediately on boot then recovered. Seems to be fine so far.
- Suggestion; plug it in and leave it overnight if it seems cold dead and doesn't appear to be charging. It seems to need to hit some critical threshold before it will work again (as indicated by previous poster). Also pick up a couple spares off amazon or newegg if you don't have a second phone available.

Hashcode's 3.0 kernel Charging Observations

disclaimer: Please delete this post if there is something like this here or somewhere else in Kindle Fire General already (and feel free to move this or re-post it somewhere else)- I have looked but haven't found anything like this yet so...
I have seen a few posts about the charging issues and feel like doing something productive here in the 'General' (non-dev) section of the Kindle Fire that may hopefully help many people using Hashcode's awesome kernel. I am running the new AOSP jelly bean rom by hashcode (using the same 3.0 kernel used by many) and have figured out the behavior almost completely in regards to charging on my device so I am going to post what I have observed in the hopes to help out others and maybe sway those 'on the fence' that aren't wanting to unlock the full potential of their device because of this 'issue'.
I recommend always using the wall charger that came with your KF. Some of the threads where people are having actual charging issues they are attempting to charge through usb. I once owned a Dell Streak 7 where usb charging was disabled (charging light would come on but it would not charge) by Dell since there wasn't enough current to adequately charge the device. So ALWAYS (whenever possible) use the included charger!
I have never yet had any issue getting my KF to charge when plugging it in when it was TURNED OFF. Plugging it in immediately turns the device on and once it starts booting up the led indicator turns from green to orange and is confirmed to be charging when accessing settings->battery.
Twice since I have flashed the JB rom I have plugged in the charger while it was on (and waited about 30 seconds) and on my KF in the settings-> battery still showed "discharging". So here's my methods when observing various charging situations (and it's really simple) of ensuring the charger will work properly.
My device's charging indicator appears to work properly but is only on when the display is on (orange when charging, green when battery level is 95-99%, off when fully charged).
An oddity I have noticed (and also read somewhere else) is that the charging indicator orange led light has a tendency to turn on (and stay on) and confirm charging much more often when the display is on so I always have the screen on when plugging it in. It's still possible to start charging with the screen off and everyone's device will behave differently. I am not trying to discourage anyone from charging with the screen off. Again this is what I have noticed in regards to my device.
Make sure that the display is on when you plug in and if the led comes on then you're good. If not, sometimes it is delayed so wait 5 seconds or so. Sometimes you need to cycle the screen on and off once or twice and the led will come on. Always confirm in settings -> battery.
If you ever plug it in and have the led come on and it immediately turns off (this is the behavior where I have experienced issues) check in the settings-> battery and if it says 'discharging' wait 5-10 seconds. Hit the refresh button. Try cycling the screen on and off once or twice. If it still shows 'discharging' then unplug the charger. Start over from the beginning (this has happened to me twice).
That's about it. So if you are on the fence and aren't sure if you should flash any ICS/JB rom only due to concerns regarding charging... please do yourself a favor and take the plunge-the performance is incredible. Hashcode and other devs here have poured out their time and efforts to make our Kindle Fires AMAZING. If you like their work and efforts hit the 'thanks':good: button. If you LOVE your dev's rom and can't imagine living without it hit the 'donate' button so you won't have to worry about living without it.:highfive:
If anyone else has any additional observations please add them to this thread- it will be very helpful for others!

Great post, thanks OP. I had the same exact problems with charging. That said, the problem seems to have gone away now that I just flashed the [CM10] Jelly Bean ROM that @twa_priv posted. With this one, Google Now works (albeit without voice search), and I'm seeing the amber indicator even when the screen's turned off.
Fantastic work by @twa_priv, and many thanks to @Hashcode!
Edit: Scratch my last. Back to keeping the screen on. It was going well for a while until the amber light decided to go off. Ah well, guess we'll have to wait a bit longer!

Great post! Mine charges regardless of both the state of the LED indicator and battery status under settings. I plug mine in every night, the LED blinks orange, goes off with the screen, and the device is charged at 100% the following morning every time. It also charges even if the status is listed as discharging, and on mine it will be listed as discharging the entire time it is plugged in. It should also be noted that mine charges just fine, albeit rather slowly, via USB.

may i just add that if you have a battery monitor widget, like Battery Life, from the play store, most have a little charge icon that shows up when the device is charging, this has worked for me ever since hash first made his kernel and it was all buggy.
hope this helps someone.

devilot said:
Great post! Mine charges regardless of both the state of the LED indicator and battery status under settings. I plug mine in every night, the LED blinks orange, goes off with the screen, and the device is charged at 100% the following morning every time. It also charges even if the status is listed as discharging, and on mine it will be listed as discharging the entire time it is plugged in. It should also be noted that mine charges just fine, albeit rather slowly, via USB.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Same for me.

After I installed jelly bean, I started having charging issues. I would leave the kindle charging on the stock charger all night and it wasn't even at ninety percent. I then noticed that I could not connect the kindle top my computer, PC or Mac, not adb not usb mount, nothing. I even loaded Ubuntu on a stick and it was not recognized. I thought maybe it was a kernel problem so I went back to Modaco and I still had all the same problems.
Coincidentally, the same day I had left the kindle in my car. Maybe the heat fried something. Just in case I thought I would post in case this happened to someone else. I don't think a kernel could fry hardware across roms.
Sent from my Amazon Kindle Fire using Tapatalk 2

My two cents:
I'm running Jandycane 1.4 (by lithium), and I'm using a charger that came with an old Moto Droid. There is no LED indicator showing anything, nor does the tablet itself have a charging symbol showing in the task bar (no lightning bolt, doesn't say "charging" or anything).
Regardless of everything, the device simply charges when it's plugged in. Every morning, I wake up to a charged KF, ready to go

[Q] n4 is completely unresponsive (dead)

So this is what happened:
the phone discharged fully and i connected it to charge. then i got a flashing red led. seeing this as a bad omen i tried to turn my device on - no luck - it wasn't responding.
i unplugged the charger and plugged it back in and again the same result, then again..... and i got a solid red light. so after a few times of messing about with it , trying out a few sources of power and such i got it charging (the battery logo appeared). The charging lasted for ~30 sec and it went black.
So after that the n4 is completely unresponsive. No flashing leds no backlight on screen, NOTHING.i tried out a few chargers and cables and beside those i used a genuine n4 charger (it's 100% working - i tried to charge another device). i left it there for the whole day to charge thinking that maaaaaby the battery ran to a complete 0 and i just need to give it time, as you probably guessed it, that did nothing.
In fact, i think the phone is not charging at all. The reason i think so is because the wall charger is emitting a faint high-pitch squeal regardless of the fact that the phone is connected (it should be squealing only when it's plugged into socket and the phone is not plugged in it)
so TL DR:
n4 is completely dead, no signs of life. The things that were tried:
a handful of chargers and cables that are 100% working on other devices
trying to boot with a combination of volume buttons pressed
holding the power button for 60 sec. while plugged in
prolonged charging (~7 hours)
verbal threatening to sell the damned thing if it's a serious problem
so that's that. i should get my tools back from a friend on monday. i'll try to take it apart, maby there's a loose connector here or there or something. Any ideas what i could try before that?

Some searching around the forums wouldn't hurt. Try this for example.

kalopop said:
Some searching around the forums wouldn't hurt. Try this for example.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thanks for the link, that seems to be worth a shot.... i'll be able to take the phone apart on monday, that's the earliest i will be able to try it. i was wondering if there is anything i can do until then to remedy the situation. I mean i'm really getting a kick out of my old sony erricson k300 but i kinda prefer the nexus and would prefer to fix it asap.

ok i fixed it
i used a 3v source and held the contacts manually for 5 min. that returned it to the red blinking led state and after leaving it to charge for 5 min it returned to the battery icon on screen. thanks for the info again.