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Help Battery indicator extremely inaccurate

W

wesc011

Lurker
Hey everyone,

I have noticed that the battery meter on my captivate (SRE + lagfix installed) is very inaccurate. For instance, I got the low battery notification and plugged my phone in when it got to 8%. However, the second I plug my phone in the battery meter jumps to 34. I unplugged it and sure enough, the battery stayed at 34%. Anyone having this problem?
 
update- ran my battery from 34% to see how far it would go, it cut off when it got to 10% and said it was completely empty when i plugged it in. very odd
 
Use Battery Widget...much more accurate (it seems), plus has a feature to easily turn major power hogs (GPS, Wi-fi, bluetooth) on and off.
 
I too have noticed that it's not accurate.

When it indicates it's nearly discharged, I plug it in. At that point it "reads" about 40% remaining. I take this with a grain of salt, as it's not unusual for battery level indicators to be inaccurate just like the signal strength indicators can be.

Also, I've decided not to let something like this bother me, as it easily could. The first thing I try and remember is that Eclair ver 2.1 is still a young version of the OS and I'm sure with the subsequent revs they will improve it.

In the meantime it's not causing any harm and I'm so happy with the overall operation of this phone that I can easily overlook the "growing pains" of Android.

Cheers... :)
 
One thing to note here guys. There is a difference between being inaccurate and erroring out on reading charge level.

Inaccurate - the default batt indicator/icon reports charge level in increments of 20%. That precision is not very accurate.

Reading charge level from the battery itself - sometime it happens you insert the plug in a jerky motion and the batt reads your single plug-in as multiple in a rapid succession. In these cases the chip inside the batt does not have sufficient time to calibrate the level properly and you may see an 8% charge raise to 40% in an instant. So just make sure you insert the USB plug gently and carefully.

I will give you an example: a few nights ago, my phone powered off because of 0% joice. I then powered it on planning to insert the plug while the phone is booting up. However I was not fast enough, and the millisecond before I inserted the plug, the phone aborted again right from the boot screen because of 0% juice. Then it semi-powered on in "charging" mode, and was showing 15% charge. Just to bring it back to 0% again, I unplugged the USB and gave it a few minutes to go back down to 0% - it took literally single minutes because the real charge was hovering above 0%.
 
I've done all of that stuff. Still every time my battery runs out, I plug it in and it jumps up to 30% or more. Ridiculous if I am wasting a third of my battery life. Maybe my phone is defective?
 
Alright guys, there has to be something more going on with this.

I just drained my battery, charged it for 20 minutes to where it said 15%. I then rebooted my phone while it remained plugged in. Now there's 51% battery left.

WTF is going on???
 
wesc011 said:
Alright guys, there has to be something more going on with this.

I just drained my battery, charged it for 20 minutes to where it said 15%. I then rebooted my phone while it remained plugged in. Now there's 51% battery left.

WTF is going on???
Click to expand...

I'm sorry to break the news to you but your phone is dyslexic.
 
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