"False" dead battery issue?

[bmchan]

Happened today. 100% to < 5% in a matter of hours. Thinking it was accurate, I shut it down. Reatarted the Droid 2 hours later to retrieve a contact number and the battery reading returned to 100% +/-. Wierd.

 

[Bigbootyman]

Defective battery?

I recently purchased a inexpensive 1350mah LI Ion battery ($17.99) as an extra to have around, from Wirelessemporium.com. All of them are made in China afterall and it's a great deal right? Not so!

Not only did I have to sand some of the excess plastic on one end of the battery to prevent it from getting stuck (opposite end of the connection terminals), I started to get these false readings of low battery power. A battery pull would clear it up and give an accurate reading. When I switched back to my original battery......no issue. So I tried the cheapy one again and went back to the power issues after a day or so.

My point is, maybe you folks have a defective battery, like the cheap one that I got. The only nice thing about this other battery, is that it charges from almost dead to full, in about 45 minutes!
After some careful thinking about risking damage to my phone, I coughed up the $40 from Verizon for an OE battery.

If I were you, I'd address your issue with your local VZW store and request a new battery.

To those of you reading this, I hope you learn from my bad experience of peeing away $20, with buying non-factory replacement parts.

 

[neutronstar789]

Dead battery - maybe, maybe not...

I have been experiencing the same problems that GhostWheel posted.

My Droid phone will normally go for 2-3 days without a charge if I don't use it.

2 days ago my battery went "dead" in about 4-5 hours. For most of the morning the cellphone was at "idle", with: Wi-Fi off, bluetooth enabled, my bluetooth headset off, and no suspicious applications running. Unfortunately the battery was too dead to check the battery-usage statistics.

I rebooted the phone, plugged in the charger, checked the cell phone about 15 minutes later and it reported 100% charge!


I used the phone that day and recharged it once, so it was above 75% at the end of the day and I didn't place it on the charger. The next morning I found the phone turned off! When I rebooted, the battery was dead again!

This time it took hours to charge it. I did not charge it last night and today, with no usage yet, the battery is down to 60% just from "Idle", "Standby", and Bluetooth modes.

I'm taking my phone into Verizon to have it tested so that I have a record of the problem.

I hope this was helpful.

 

[soops]

Neutronstar,

Have you been charging via usb/pc? I had similar problems as stated on my earlier post. I've been using wall charging for the last 4 charges and I'm putting a mental note to alternate between wall and usb charging and will see if the problem will reoccur..

 

[daddyo]

Thanks for posting this thread.

I woke up the other morning to find my 75%-charged-the-night-before Droid at about 5%, so I plugged it in to my car adapter to charge on the way to work and 20 minutes later I unplugged it at work and it was at about 60-70%.

It also happened once before when I was out to eat. I was playing around with it, waiting for my order. Once my order came, it went into idle mode and I left it alone. After dinner, I unlocked it and it told me my battery was at about 5% and needed a charge. I didn't have my car charger yet, so I turned it off and charged it at home. As soon as I plugged it in, it showed me a charge of about 80%.

I have only a handful of third-party apps installed and haven't tried installing Swype.

 

[zatomonkey]

I've had this happen 3 or 4 times in the last six months. No swype. Usually after 5-6 hours after removing from wall charger. Unusual last incident: left on wall charger overnight. Awoke to droid alarm clock and noticed red led blinking, while plugged into the charger! Removed from wall charger, got complaint that battery was at less than 5%, power cycle, and indicator back to 100% battery. Very wierd.

 

[psychicdroid]

I've had it twice. At the time I didn't have swype in stalled.

 

[subsynth]

I've had it happen a few times. Twice it was in my pocket and I heard the battery warning sound.
Once I pulled it out of my pocket and it was just off. It had shut itself down.
Another time it happened right in front of me, I was opening up Google Voice when it happened.

This has happened on a few different ROMs. I typically use P3 kernels so I don't know if that may have something to do with it.

 

[Dankinia]

I have had this happen to me a few times too since I got the phone in January. It seems to happen about every 2 weeks or so. Usually a reboot of the phone fixes the problem for me. I don't think it is related to Swype, because I wasn't using that until a couple of weeks ago.

 

[monkeydog]

This happens to my phone everytime it approaches around 500 hours of uptime. So, about once a month unless I need to restart the phone before this occurs for some reason.