Samsung Note 2 - Strange Battery Problem

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gman

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Running Android 4.1.2 and over the last week a strange battery drain has started to happen overnight. Last night it happened in the space of two hours - it was sitting at 78% and then two hours later it was at 28%. Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS etc were all off. Syncing is disabled and all push notifications are off.

Then this morning the phone is completely dead even though I'd turned on Blocking Mode as well.

Looking at the battery history there's nothing obvious, with the screen being the highest and then the Android OS. When I tap into the graph it shows the sudden decline in battery life and underneath it details that no wifi was on, the screen never came on and the phone was only awake the odd time.

What I don't get is what could possibly drain the phone by 50% in the space of two hours considering you can apparently watch movies back to back on it for 12 hours?

Are there any battery monitors that are better than the built in one which would show a timeline battery usage for each element?


Cheers
 
Firstly get a battery monitor that displays the usage in mA. I use "battery monitor widget" (BMW).
Secondly do a reset by turning the phone off and removing the battery for a few minutes.

I've had instances where the BMW power usage graphs show an unexplained battery drain of more than 10% per hour and nothing short of removing the battery will stop it, I suspect it's something to do with Facebook, GPS or Google maps.

You can also go into the running apps screen and shut down anything that shouldn't be running, as sometimes an app can fail to close properly.
 
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I've got a task manager app which I always use to close down everything, but I still can't imagine what can drain the battery at this rate? 10% per hour would be the maximum I'd expect the phone to drain at, but this was like 50% in the space of two hours!

Here's a screenshot from the battery graph. The time at the bottom doesn't make sense as it's not 12pm yet! lol

Screenshot5.jpg
 
I wonder if Android 4.2 would help?
 
Battery might just need calibrating. The charger will switch off when it thinks it's full and start to discharge, but that may only be at 50%.
 
The other thing is (as touched on with the calibration comment), with my N7 the battery % is completely wrong. I've been forced to go by the battery voltage instead of the %.

3600mV is dead, 4250mV = Full
This applies to pretty much all phone batteries.

But the OS (4.0-4.2) reports whatever it likes, sometimes 40% at 3650mV, sometimes 0% at 3900mV, sometimes 70% at 4200mV.

If you use an app like the one I mentioned earlier, it allows you to see %, mA, mV, temperature, time remaining, time since disconnect, time to full charge and a tonne of other stuff (without actually causing battery drain itself).
 
I have a sneaky suspicion it's related to my 4G being on, not so much it being 4G but something is causing it to connect every few seconds. I've disabled background data on everything that seems to use it and even with blocking mode on it still seems to access.

Turned the data connection off completely and will see how it goes but already I can it's only a trickle (using that app you mentioned) and gone from 9% per hour usage to 0.1% per hour (or 189mA to 2mA. That's some difference!
 
Download GSam battery monitor. It breaks down usage to the minutest detail.
Also if you think you have a background data issue when the phone is inactive then download juice defender.
It switches of your data when your screen goes off and is one of the best on the market for data control.
 
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The screenshot from earlier was from that app, but it's definitely something to do with networking as I've had the data turned off for the last few hours (except for once or twice) and check it out now:

2013-07-01-20-50-49.jpg


Will check out that juice defender, I had it on my last phone but didn't like it. Can't remember why though.


Cheers
 
4g is a total battery drain. Think it drains at twice the rate of 3G which drains about twice as fast as wifi. It's the most likely reason.
 
But it's fast and I like it :nuts:
 
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