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Battery problems, quirks and issues: Read first.

I had the same idea as you Gremlyn

Two nights ago I used the regular wall charger on the phone. It was completely dead when I plugged it in. When I unplugged it about 8hrs later it was at 100% (I don't know how long it took to reach 100%). Then I started it up, it immediately dropped to 80% (while I was killing some of the apps that boot with the phone) and held there for a while. And as previously stated, I got 12hrs of life out of it (3hrs of non-stop internet use during 4hrs of normal time and 8hrs of below 15% time browsing the net, playing games, sending e-mails).

Last night I used the USB charger on the dead battery phone. I got up this morning and checked on it. It was STILL charging, nearly 10+hrs later!
So I started it up while it was still on the charger, disabled those apps (the same as yesterday) and let it finish charging. So far it has been 40mins off the charger and I have replied to one e-mail, read 5 others, downloaded and used note taking app, and it's still at 100%. Better than yesterday for sure. Lets see how long this holds.:)
 
Man, I thought I was dealing with issues with the battery on my Hero but at least it was giving me an accurate reading of my battery life compared to my Moment. But I'll take the additional 5 hours with 15% battery life remaining. :confused:

I'm guessing that HTC tweaked 1.5 enough when they got their hands on on the OS to have a stop gap measure just to have an OS that operates on CDMA but it looks like Samsung didn't even bother. Probably thinking that they'll address the bugs when they come out with 2.0. More likely both Samsung and Sprint wanted to rush the phone to market and beat the Big Red and Moto to the punch. Not sure if that was such a great marketing move...
 
Some time within the last 10mins it dropped to 90%. Pessimistically that's about 45mins at 100% unplugged.
It seems that either the conditioning or the USB charger is making a significant difference. I just don't know which one it is yet.
 
I thought my battery problem turned the corner this morning. I charged the phone via usb last night. I went to sleep with the phone at 70% and woke up(6.5 hours later), the phone was at 60%. I said "could this be?" Maybe my phone has turned the corner! It turns out the sprint radio died for some reason, so the phone was doing nothing. I had to reboot. Once I rebooted, and the Sprint radio came back on, bam! It was down to 15% within 30 minutes.

I was at Sprint last night. The rep at the Sprint store told me I killed the battery by over charging it. Especially when you are conditioning the battery. He said I should never charge a phone battery overnight. He was willing to waive a restocking fee should I choose to go back to the Hero. I wasn't going to press the matter. They didn't have a Moment or Hero in stock. I have to go back today.
 
I usually use the 3G for data and don't bother turning on WiFi. So yesterday I tried something different and turned on WiFi. I didn't use the phone much through out the day and over night, but 18 hours later the battery was still at 70%.

Spare Parts reported 26% "Running" during that time with "Screen On" for about 6%.

I'm going to reset and try this experiment again today.
 
rldev said:
I thought my battery problem turned the corner this morning. I charged the phone via usb last night. I went to sleep with the phone at 70% and woke up(6.5 hours later), the phone was at 60%. I said "could this be?" Maybe my phone has turned the corner! It turns out the sprint radio died for some reason, so the phone was doing nothing. I had to reboot. Once I rebooted, and the Sprint radio came back on, bam! It was down to 15% within 30 minutes.

I was at Sprint last night. The rep at the Sprint store told me I killed the battery by over charging it. Especially when you are conditioning the battery. He said I should never charge a phone battery overnight. He was willing to waive a restocking fee should I choose to go back to the Hero. I wasn't going to press the matter. They didn't have a Moment or Hero in stock. I have to go back today.
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Did you have the phone connected to a pc or laptop via usb or was it one of those adapters that you plug in the usb into, like htc uses?
 
Try just regular ac. I have never had a problem charging a phone over night by using ac.....never tried by pc. Maybe too much power or not...Will take that as a future note of things not to try. :D
 
crow11ad said:
Try just regular ac. I have never had a problem charging a phone over night by using ac.....never tried by pc. Maybe too much power or not...Will take that as a future note of things not to try. :D
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I have used AC as well. Makes no difference for my particular phone. It will be replaced today.
 
So I decided to revise my plan a little and tried my wife's Pre charger last night. It is a 5V, 1.0A instead of the 5V, 0.7A we got with our phones. It didn't help, I started at 80% this morning like usual.

I now have the phone charging on my work bench via my car charger hooked up to a bench top power supply. It has been going almost an hour and isn't fully charged last I checked. I'll leave it going there for a while longer and see how it looks. When I was driving to work, after having it plugged in for 25-ish mins, the Battery Graph said that it had charged to only 90%, when it was at 'full' less than 45 mins prior.

I'm more starting to think that the charging system on the phone isn't quite right, and that it is thinking it is fully charged and cutting off the battery before it should. We'll see in a little while... I'll ask our resident power specialist what he thinks of it all when he gets here.
 
rldev said:
I was at Sprint last night. The rep at the Sprint store told me I killed the battery by over charging it. Especially when you are conditioning the battery. He said I should never charge a phone battery overnight.
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I'm sorry, I feel that's complete BS. Every phone I have ever had has charged overnight all the time with no problems. The phones and batteries have system built in to stop charging the battery when needed to PREVENT over charging.

This is what happens when you over charge a LI Ion battery:
YouTube - Lithium Ion Ionen battery overcharge & explosion
 
i've been meaning to mention that i charged my Moment with the power off on Sunday night and it charged to 100% in ONE hour and lasted longer than any other day i have noticed. was at 60% around 9pm Monday night.
 
Gremlyn1 said:
I'm sorry, I feel that's complete BS. Every phone I have ever had has charged overnight all the time with no problems. The phones and batteries have system built in to stop charging the battery when needed to PREVENT over charging.

This is what happens when you over charge a LI Ion battery:
YouTube - Lithium Ion Ionen battery overcharge & explosion
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I know it was BS, but these are not the types you want to pick a fight with as you will get nowhere. The fact that he had no problem swapping out the phone with any other phone and no restocking fee is why I didn't say anything. He was nice, but misinformed as usual. My wife was almost in tears laughing when he started spewing this stuff.
 
Phone came off the charger at 7 and at 10:40 it's still at 100% after some texting and a little bit of crapper gaming.
 
Any idea how to keep some of these apps from restarting automatically? I don't need Moxier or the Voice command stuff, but they get restarted within 10 minutes of me killing them. We've gotten our battery issues mostly taken care of with a full drain and recharge, but this app thing is still annoying me.
 
rldev said:
I was at Sprint last night. The rep at the Sprint store told me I killed the battery by over charging it. Especially when you are conditioning the battery. He said I should never charge a phone battery overnight. He was willing to waive a restocking fee should I choose to go back to the Hero. I wasn't going to press the matter. They didn't have a Moment or Hero in stock. I have to go back today.
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I won't claim to know a lot about electricity, but my understanding is that if you have a 5v battery, you need to hook it up to at least 5v to charge it... and the only limit is getting it to where the battery charges too fast and overheats. This is why if you made a home charger with AA batteries, you'd need 3 AA's in series (for 4.5 volts) to make our 3.7v battery charge.

The included charger for this phone is 5v, .7A. People who say their usb cable charges things faster may be getting as high as 5.5, but I think the amperage is only .5A.

Bottom line, as long as your battery doesn't overheat you can pretty much do whatever. If you had it plugged into the included charger or usb cable, it is unlikely you 'fried' it. And Sprint store reps tend to have no idea what they're talking about. They told my friend his battery had gotten wet because it was pink (Blackberry phone). Charged him $50 to replace the battery, we got home and I googled 'wet battery blackberry' and found out black X's appear if you get the damn thing wet, so the Sprint guy was full of it. They told me that by using the car charger from Radio Shack, I was going to burn up my phone... but they're really just mad I wasn't going to buy their $30 charger.
 
Update on my battery graph:

The graph has become linear for 80-50%, but 100%-80% still occurs in like 10 minutes, and from 50% it just drops to 15% and then holds there. There was a brief stop at 30%, but that only lasted for a single data point. Right now I'm at 15%, and have been off the charger and USB since 8am yesterday.
 
So I charged the phone up via my car charger hooked to my bench power supply, ran it at 12V, drew about 0.1A and after almost 30 mins charging in the car and about another hour on the bench supply the phone was back to full. So I took it off... and it stayed at 100% for 20 mins! Dropped to 90% for about an hour, then down to 80% for 30 mins, and is currently at 70%.

Something isn't right with the charging mechanism, I'm going to do some more in depth testing on it tomorrow after trying just a standard overnight charge to see if I can figure out how/why/where exactly it stops charging.

We might have two separate issues, one with the crappy power meter, and one with the charging hardware (hopefully software fixable). Isn't Samsung supposed to test this crap before they sign off on a shippable product?
 
Gremlyn1 said:
So I charged the phone up via my car charger hooked to my bench power supply, ran it at 12V, drew about 0.1A and after almost 30 mins charging in the car and about another hour on the bench supply the phone was back to full. So I took it off... and it stayed at 100% for 20 mins! Dropped to 90% for about an hour, then down to 80% for 30 mins, and is currently at 70%.

Something isn't right with the charging mechanism, I'm going to do some more in depth testing on it tomorrow after trying just a standard overnight charge to see if I can figure out how/why/where exactly it stops charging.

We might have two separate issues, one with the crappy power meter, and one with the charging hardware (hopefully software fixable). Isn't Samsung supposed to test this crap before they sign off on a shippable product?
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I think its still just all battery level software problems. If you charge to 100% via any method, drain to 80%, then charge back to 100%, and do it one or more times in succession, the indicator will stay at high % for longer... but in the end your uptime will play out to be about the same. You're really only just manipulating the charge reading, not the charge. The battery is only going to give what it always has.
 
Zumaki said:
I think its still just all battery level software problems. If you charge to 100% via any method, drain to 80%, then charge back to 100%, and do it one or more times in succession, the indicator will stay at high % for longer... but in the end your uptime will play out to be about the same. You're really only just manipulating the charge reading, not the charge. The battery is only going to give what it always has.
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If the software is tied in to the reading and communication with the battery that is or isn't full, then I agree with you. I tried replugging the phone in on the wall charger and was not able to get it past the 80%, though I had it off the charger all of 15 mins before doing so.
 
Gremlyn1, I believe it will always take longer to charge a phone that is nearly full than it does to drain it when it is nearly full. So when you are trying to charge a phone that was off the charger for 15 minutes, it will take a bit longer than 15 minutes to charge it back to 100 pct. dkjones96 posted curves of how batteries get charged a little earlier in this forum.
804li-ion-battery-life-Figure01.jpg


With respect to your earlier comment about charging stopping too early, perhaps Samsung had deemed it unsafe to charge it more than what it does. That you are using a 12 V power supply seems to me to be a flaw with your experiment rather than Samsung? Of course it will take more charge at 12 V. I am not an electrician but this is what I remember from my college physics class.

That being said, I don't mean to come off defending Samsung, because I think it is abhorrent that they shipped the phone with such a wacky battery meter.
 
My battery meter says 15% right now, but when I tried the self-test boot, it said it was at 50%.

I'm just as baffled as anyone else might be.
 
krishnac said:
That being said, I don't mean to come off defending Samsung, because I think it is abhorrent that they shipped the phone with such a wacky battery meter.
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We should have all known going into this that we were gonna have issues. You never get electronics like this the day they come out without expecting some sort of issues. I know I did. I was expecting it to be worse than it is honestly.

As we use these and kill them the battery meters are working themselves out. What's to say they saw the issue in engineering, made adjustments, and while they thought it was fixed it was really just a normal discharge/charge cycle fixing it like we are doing.
 
ok after three full discharge/charge cycles with no improvement with the battery meter i decided to try the theory of using the usb cable instead of the ac cord. I took the phone of the charger connected to my laptop at 6:30 this morning, its now 3:18 and my phone only reads 70%. thats with a few calls and texts and browsing for 10 min. battery graph shows it took 3 hours to go to 90%, an hour and 32 minutes to reach 80% and about another hour and 30 minutes to get where its at now, 70%. not bad. not sure if this improvement is because of the charging from usb or not but i will continue to charge that way from now on.
 
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