A possible cause for your droid's bad performance

[JiUnit]

I've been cursing my droid for several months since its performance became incredibly slow. When I closed an app that often downloads data from the web, such as cnet or TIME, all the app icons suddenly disappeared from the screen and wouldn't come back for 10~20 seconds. Besides, the switch from one screen to another gets very jerky, plus the overall hampered performance, making me really irritated.

Yesterday I accidentally solved the problem: switching the battery. With the old battery that I've been recharging once every day since a year ago, I can hear some weired "tickling" noise if I press the back of my droid to my ear. After I replace the battery with a new one, the noise is gone and my droid gets back to normal with much better performances. I guess that the old battery could not power the CPU as well as it used to, and the overall performance gets hampered when the machine is underpowered. If anyone has similar problem you might want to try switching the battery and see if that helps.

 

[shadowdude777]

Huh... can't see why this would work though. A new battery and an old battery charged to 100% have essentially the same voltages.

 

[Wpz2000]

Your battery puts out about 3.6v when it is close to empty. The CPU uses a voltage closer to 1v. The phone's hardware has a switching regulator which converts the battery's 3.6v to a lower voltage for the CPU. A near dead battery that can power up the phone will put out enough for the CPU to run properly, otherwise the phone would crash or shut down.

Your phone is probably working fine now because you turned it off to change the battery and this cleaned out a poorly running or crashed app which was hogging cpu cycles.

 

[JiUnit]

I guess it might be due to that the discharge curve of voltage gets unstable (maybe less smooth than before?) for the old battery. A pure guess, though.

 

[JiUnit]

I tried to turn off the cell phone and turn it back on with the same old battery, it didn't work. The problems remained. Somehow this new battery solves the problem. I am not quite sure why.

Your battery puts out about 3.6v when it is close to empty. The CPU uses a voltage closer to 1v. The phone's hardware has a switching regulator which converts the battery's 3.6v to a lower voltage for the CPU. A near dead battery that can power up the phone will put out enough for the CPU to run properly, otherwise the phone would crash or shut down.

Your phone is probably working fine now because you turned it off to change the battery and this cleaned out a poorly running or crashed app which was hogging cpu cycles.

 

[Wpz2000]

Don't use the old battery anymore. Throw it in the recycle bin. It's dead. The ticking sound you hear is the switching regulator trying to power the phone with insufficient capacity. Continuing to use this battery will damage the switching regulator as it wasn't designed to switch at this high frequency.

In all honestly, your phone (the power regulator circuit) is probably out of spec. The regulator should not be making the high frequency noise and should simply power off.

 

[JiUnit]

Thanks dude. I already threw the old battery away. Another weired thing to mention is that, with the old battery the phone plays music in a funny way: it randomly raises the tone and speed of a song so that a male singer sounds like a young girl who's screaming.

Don't use the old battery anymore. Throw it in the recycle bin. It's dead. The ticking sound you hear is the switching regulator trying to power the phone with insufficient capacity. Continuing to use this battery will damage the switching regulator as it wasn't designed to switch at this high frequency.

In all honestly, your phone (the power regulator circuit) is probably out of spec. The regulator should not be making the high frequency noise and should simply power off.

 

[shadowdude777]

Again, somewhere in there, a component in either the amp or the DAC is probably not getting enough voltage to function properly.

It may also be a capacitor, if it sounds anything like a disposable camera does after you take a picture and it makes that high-pitched whine.

As Wpz2000 said, since all components (including the voltage regulation chip) will have a fluctuation in their parameters when they're fabricated, it could be that Motorola designs them to just barely work (wouldn't surprise me), and the chip in your phone has a voltage limit too high for a battery that can't reach 100% charge capacity.

If you know anyone with a Droid, try the battery in theirs; it should work without issue.