This thread refers to cases where the HTC Kaiser (and probably other HTC phone models with the same built-in GPS chip, such as Polaris) sucks the battery empty within a single day, particularly during standby, particularly if all features of the phone are DISABLED, or after low usage. Another symptom may be a phone which unexpectedly did not come back to life, but operated normally after recharging. Yet another symptom is unusually short battery life through normal use. Note, this thread is not about limited battery endurance due to heavy usage.
*** Battery drain FAQ ***
How can I see whether my Kaiser is affected?
- A large percentage of HTC phones with Qualcomm chipset and internal GPS seems to suffer from the bug described here, some appear to be robust enough, likely depending on chip revisions. If you never ever use GPS, you are probably out of risk. If you use GPS at least occasionally, you should have a look at your phone, and closely. It is possible that an otherwise normal to heavy use of the phone conceals a basic, added current consumption which is what we are talking about here. In such a situation you may have got used to a certain battery endurance, which may be much higher under normal circumstances. So far I observed currents between 28 and 78 mA, depending on DUT and OS. Some users reported currents in excess of 100mA. Note, this added current does nothing for you, except accelerate your battery drain!
How to check this?
- Check the true standby current (see the following description). That simple.
How to measure the standby current?
- Clean up: switch all phone features off (GPS, Phone, Bluetooth, Media Player, really everything). Terminate all applications, use Task Manager to verify this. Make sure no processor intensive background tasks are running (standard installations should meet this requirement). Do NOT soft reset at this point!
- Put the phone in standby, and wait approx. 10 seconds. The phone needs a while to complete entering the standby though it appears to be off immediately.
- Now measure the current. Best and fastest way of doing it would be to have a current meter connected between your battery and your phone which gives you realtime readouts. Second to that is a suitable battery tool, such as "BatteryStatus", but you have to get used to the delayed current display (see post #4 for details). Using the software battery gauge, you should wait an additional 20 seconds or so to allow for the current capture, then reactivate from standby and take the lowest possible current readout.
- If the phone is in a good condition, the standby current must be in the range 1..3 mA, roughly. If you see a repeatable current well in excess of 20mA, your phone is in the BAD condition !!
- Another simple method is to leave the cleaned up phone in standby overnight. Next morning, soft reset your phone because the phone may have lost track of the battery capacity. Check whether the capacity dropped dramatically. And also check whether the phone feels warm to the touch.
How to reproduce the problem?
- Activate GPS until you get a fix. Probably receiving the first NMEA strings is good enough, but I have not verified this. GPSTest, HTC's GPS Tool or any navigation software does the job.
- Deactivate GPS. Just to be safe, terminate the GPS software, too.
- Check the standby current.
- The fault does not pop up always, so you may have to repeat these steps several times until it appears. The phones I tested usually catch fever after only one or two tries, but it is possible that you need to cycle through this procedure 5 or 10 times. Which is in the nature of intermittent bugs.
How to reset this nasty condition?
- Fault recovery is possible by continued on/off cycling of the GPS unit, similar to what provoked this fault.
- Activating the cellphone unit does also seem to cause the phone to return to a low consumption, but maybe not in all cases.
- Try to soft reset your phone, or to cycle the power to the phone (long press of the power button).
- If you really cannot get rid of the problem, back up your phone data, then execute a hard reset. BEFORE restoring the phone, load a battery gauge software and see whether the consumption is gone. If yes, some application is likely to cause your headaches.
After performing one of the above steps you may repeat the described current measurement, to confirm that the standby current is back in the normal range.
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Original text:
I have reason to believe that all Kaiser models are prone to the "excessive standby current consumption" problem. I tried it on two original "VPA compact V" by Vodafone (= HTC Kaiser), using the original WM6, ROM 1.56.162.5, Radio 1.27.12.11. I gave a **** on warranty now, stepped up through HardSPL to "Duttys_Official_WM6.1_Rom_5.2.19716_UC.zip", Radio 1.64.08.21. The results are all the same: an excessive current consumption which can vary between 25 and 75 mA. Interestingly, the current is always the same in a specific setup, but varies between phones and operating systems. In the latest case, the same phone took 28mA under WM6, went up to 78mA under WM61. Consequence being, the battery will be sucked empty within a day or so, without obvious reason. The only mitigation is a reset, or a complete switch-off.
There is no application which could cause the current consumption, at least none I installed. It does not even matter which GPS application you used. The only active processes are (according to TaskManager, latest WM6.1 version, ".exe" omitted for the sake of ease): filesys, device, biotouch, gwes, shell32, cprog, services, quickdial, connmgr, mediahubmini, taskmgr, htcactionscreen, sapsettings, aplauncher, quickmenu, nk. I repeat: ALL applications properly terminated, ALL internal units are OFF (WLAN, Bluetooth, Phone, GPRS, GPS, Camera, Media Player etc. - really NOTHING).
Before anybody prematurely states that these findings can not be reproduced: the problem is unlikely to appear if you switch on the GPS for a couple of NMEA strings, then off again (though it did already). If need be, you have to leave it on for a while, play a bit, walk around a bit and so on. Take your time testing it _thoroughly_, really. I cannot tell when the fault actually appears, and it may not come up immediately because it seems somewhat sporadic in nature - but take my word, it will, I observed this issue for a long enough time. I can only repeat myself: I am sure there is something wrong with the power management in the GPS driver.
Anybody, feel free to contribute, but PLEASE avoid funny statements like "you have to shut down all programs", "WLAN can take up lots of energy" and so on. And before you express doubts just because there are not quite many people out there who come to the same conclusions, think again. Without going into details, most users are simply not in the position to come to the correct conclusions.
BusterTyTN
OK, making it sticky; depending on the feedback, I (or other mods) may unstick it in the future.
How do you measure current while in standby? When it's running, I can see current usage in the battery monitor of AE Button plus. Just after wake up from standby, it shows 16ma. A few seconds later it jumps to 385ma and then settles at 140ma.
I'm using 3.02.DKv0.0 6.1 Lite Rom from akadonny.
@ Menneisyys: thanx!
@ tdusen:
there's two ways of doing it. First, I do not know whether "AE Button plus" works in a similar way, but "BatteryStatus" (also included in Dutty's newest WM61 release) has some seconds of a delay in the current display. I assume this is because of an averaging process running in the background which collects current samples over a certain period of time, or soemthing to this effect. Anyway; you have to keep your in standby for at least 10..20 seconds, then reactivate the PDA. If it's still showing a high current, tip on the current/power display a few times, in most cases this helps getting the low standby current. You simply have to try to catch the lowest reading, right after reactivation from standby. If everything is OK, you will get a current reading of a few mA, maximum (in most cases 1..3 mA), assuming you shut every feature of your phone off.
The other way is also the verification of the "BatteryStatus" method. I built a current shunt test probe and measured the battery current directly. Attached is a screenshot taken with my digital scope, which shows typical results (see above -- moved to post #1).
In your case - just to be safe, give your PDA a soft reset, and leave everything off. Check your current reading. If it's still at 16mA as you wrote, I wouldn't bother. Later you may fire up a GPS application like GPSTest, the HTC GPSTool, Tomtom, OziExplorerCE or whatever, and play with it for a while. Running a circle or two around your house should do it. Switch GPS off again, make sure all tasks have ended (if you want to make it perfect). Repeat checking the current as described above. It is also possible that you have to redo the test one or two times until the problem appears. You will see!
BusterTyTN
Addendum to the previous post: explanation of the screenshot.
The vertical center is zero current, discharge currents are going down. To the very left you see the PDA coming out of a soft reset, then I switched it into standby (the short flat line right before the 200sec division, ~0..1mA). Directly at the 200sec division I reactivated the phone, started GPSTest, waited until GPS was all up and running, stopped GPS and terminated the program. I also checked that no other applications were running at that time. After a little while the current settled to a discharge current of approx. 48 mA (the wide track in the center; the exact level can vary between devices). It continues drawing this amount of current until the battery is empty, or until you soft reset the device. I did the latter to the right of the screenshot, which shows another boot sequence followed by a standby, which in turn returned to a very low current consumption.
Also give a try to acbTaskMan - it's a very nice meter tool, see my related articles
I don't know anything about current measurement, but my kaiser usually lasts 2-3 days of intensive use (1-2 hours calls/day + some GPRS data + bluetooth always on + GPS once a week) and it seems quite OK for such device.
Rumcajs_tr said:
I don't know anything about current measurement, but my kaiser usually lasts 2-3 days of intensive use (1-2 hours calls/day + some GPRS data + bluetooth always on + GPS once a week) and it seems quite OK for such device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Seriously thats gr8... What ROM / Radio are you using??
Rumcajs_tr said:
I don't know anything about current measurement, but my kaiser usually lasts 2-3 days of intensive use (1-2 hours calls/day + some GPRS data + bluetooth always on + GPS once a week) and it seems quite OK for such device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's intensive????????
How about 5-6 HOURS of calls a day
4-5 HOURS a day of HSDPA
checking emails every 15 minutes on 3 email accounts
sending emails 60-75 times a day
WI-FI 1-2 hours a day
150 SMS/Texts a day
10-20 MMS a day
and then a few misc. apps ran.
To me, my usage is not really intensive, but I do have to have a car charger and a couple of wall chargers because I can run a battery dead in about 5 hours.
i played doom for 30 minutes starting at 100% battery, and the battery was at 75% afterwards. i had to charge it for about 30+ minutes to get it back up.
On a daily basis, i will go to school, leave my phone in my pocket on standby, then by the end of school its at about 80%. i did nothing all day and it dropped 20%.
I would agree, 5-6 hours is probably the max i can get out of it.
BusterTyTN said:
...
I have reason to believe that all Kaiser models are prone to the "excessive standby current consumption" problem.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
At least two devices work nicely as far as battey power is concerned.
I still enjoy more than 10 days standby with phone switched on.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=1652208#post1652208
I hope you'll find a solution.
Regards,
V
T-Mobile Germany
VARIO III rom 1.56.111.4
radio 1.27.12.11
When my phone is on, but not running any active apps, it consumes about 145 mA - 150 mA with nothing but my phone on and backlight lower 3rd bar.
I've read some others guys on the forum have a power consumption of about 100 mA with higher backlight settings.
indeed excessive consumption
I must confirm the OP's finding. Though I assume it is simply related to the Radio used (see comparison in another thread where est. time of usage went from 227 to +400 minutes)
When I used my stock rom with radio 1.27, I wouls still have 40-50% cap using all day Blutooth on, no 3G, still GPS enabled for 3 hours.
When I falshed to DCS 1.7 and changed radio to 1.64, power consumption doubled, draining the battery at incredible speed (full chare morning, less than 10% in late afternoon)
I had to disable BT radio and set backlight low to let me go through the end of the day.
Looking forward to read a solution here.
With stock orange radio and rom, my device would last circa 36 hrs with very light usage and about 6/7 hours with heavy usage.
With Dutty V3 and orange stock radio (1.27) I got very similar, maybe slightly faster drain.
I have today flashed dutty 6.1 and a 1.64 radio and will monitor battery usage tomorrow.
There's a lot of anecdotal information here...
To get this to baseline information I suggest the following starting point:
1. Device (Kaiser, tilt, etc)
2. Which battery are you using (brand, mAh rating, etc)
3. Which Rom and radio version
4. What application are you using to measure current draw? (Great spot for a recommendation or a .CAB file)
5. Provide typical usage description and corresponding battery life
6. At what point do you charge the battery (i.e. top off every night, charge whenever power's available, recharge only when battery hits low level (i.e. 10%)
To effectively analyze the data, there needs to be a consistent method of capture.
Be careful not to mix up the problems here!!!
1. I assume you will not be confronted with this problem when you never use GPS at all, though you should not treat this as a final statement - has to be investigated further. So far I have not found any increased standby consumption if I did not touch GPS (well, at least after the last soft reset).
2. I am not talking about short battery uptime under heavy use, either. For instance, if you have GPS permanently on, you can suck the battery empty within 4~5 hours, max.. However, it is well possible that a suspiciously short uptime is somewhat concealed by an overall heavy use of the phone. To figure this out, you simply have to check the standby current consumption of a suspicious phone, with all its features (temporarily) disabled, as described earlier.
3. Note, this problem is all about current consumption during standby !
@ Liquidsilver:
"anecdotal information", sure. Please read again, particularly the start of the thread which will answer most of your questions. Add the thread "TyTN II / Kaiser issue: GPS & battery drain" for the remaining ones.
Please try to understand. You can get the phone into a condition where it sucks the battery dead empty within 24 hours give or take, during standby, all features of the phone OFF. ZERO usage. PROVEN, some 10 times, on different Kaiser's, using different OS's.
@ Stay0Puft:
if your battery capacity does not drop much overnight, you may look at an issue other than the one described here.
I would like to add my observation to high battery drain. Normally on my stock Kaiser rom that I used for about 4 months, normal overnight drain is 4% with radio in standby and BT On, WiFi Off. I use GPS with iGuidance almost daily and seldom soft reset.
I have witnessed extremely high power drain only a few times and they were always involved somehow with WiFi. If I have WiFi On and forget to turn it off and just put the phone in standby or let it auto power off, I have found the phone hot to the touch and dead or close to dead in only a couple of hours. The phone is usually locked up and non responsive at this point, needing a soft reset. I haven't found what causes this, it's been at home on my wireless LAN but with no active application, WiFi was simply on. I make it a point to keep WiFi Off when not actively needed and never have issues in many months of use.
If you haven't checked this out, I'd be curious to see what the current meter would show. At some point I'll drag out the scope and make a shunt as well, just no time these days...
AT&T Tilt...
I used to get 2-3 days with mediocre usage when i first bought it... and now i'm lucky if it lasts an entire day... I cannot trust it with my morning alarm anymore... I dont think its the ROM, because i even tried flashing AT&T Tilt rom back on and even the minor update on HTC... but still no luck... I think i need like a calibrator program...
I cannot find a decent explanation of some of the power management options available for my Diamond and so I wondered if an expert would mind explaining what the following are, what they do and how much power we might expect to save by enabling them in the power management section of advanced config:
AsyncMac1
PPTP1
L2TP1
I dont want to compromise the ease of going online, my IMAP email polling or my push email through ActiveSync, but of course I am keen to extend battery life.
In addition, I have found that during my 1 hour commute undergroud each day, my battery goes down by about 20%! However, the next hour (in my office), battery usage drops by only around 5-10% depending on usage. Does anyone have any specific advise to help with this? On the underground, the device goes to sleep as well as I am not using it.
Thanks in advance.
The Jones said:
In addition, I have found that during my 1 hour commute undergroud each day, my battery goes down by about 20%! However, the next hour (in my office), battery usage drops by only around 5-10% depending on usage. Does anyone have any specific advise to help with this? On the underground, the device goes to sleep as well as I am not using it.
Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
that's normal. using yr phone in a place where the reception is not good will drain yr battery faster.
i can add (there is a relation) that the level of radiation that any phone is emitting it is also higher when reception it is not strong enough. i've seen it demonstrated yesterday. entering in yr car double the level of radiation, in an elevator the radiation increases 10 folds! yr phone tries to connect and that's energy consuming and radiation emitting (electromagnetic).
KukurikU said:
that's normal. using yr phone in a place where the reception is not good will drain yr battery faster.
i can add (there is a relation) that the level of radiation that any phone is emitting it is also higher when reception it is not strong enough. i've seen it demonstrated yesterday. entering in yr car double the level of radiation, in an elevator the radiation increases 10 folds! yr phone tries to connect and that's energy consuming and radiation emitting (electromagnetic).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for that. Now I am not sure if I should try and solve this problem or throw away my phone and save the radiation
But just in case I choose to keep using it, is there anything I can do to mitigate this rapid power loss at all? Is there a setting which will stop the phone from trying too hard in these circumstances?
Check this out:
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Your-Cell-Phone-Battery-Last-Longer
The Jones said:
Thanks for that. Now I am not sure if I should try and solve this problem or throw away my phone and save the radiation
But just in case I choose to keep using it, is there anything I can do to mitigate this rapid power loss at all? Is there a setting which will stop the phone from trying too hard in these circumstances?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
don't save the radiation!
the ministry of health in my country just issue a general warning regarding the danger of prolonged/heavy use of mobile phones. it is strongly recommended to use the phone only in open spaces and with headphones. they even warn the mobile phone users not to sleep with their phone close by. the phone is constantly emitting electromagnetic radiations.
i guess that you bought yr phone not too long ago. i know it sounds strange but after a few cycles yr battery's life is going to improve and i am not the only one to observe it.
don't stop the charging when the battery icon is full. i learned using a wall charger with LED (red for charging, green for charged) that after diamond's icon said 100% the charging continues for at least 30 minutes more (the led was not fully green but was blinking red-green).
from my experience u can use all power management option from shap's advanced configuration without loosing yr connectivity. i can not tell u what those option are but after using all i can tell that diamond's battery life improved.
I have tried using all the power saving options in advanced config tool, but when I restarted my device, I lost connectivity. I couldnt connect to anything. So I set them back to disabled, soft reset the phone and all is well again.
Any idea what that could be?
I know there is another thread about this, but I feel that it does need bringing to everyone's attention, as it may not be a hardware issue...
It seems that when I have my diamond on charge, the lower section of the rear of the case gets very warm. Now at first, I thaught the battery charging or being under load was the issue, but it seems more like the area which is heating up, is the area where I assume the CPU is (to the left of the sim card slot as you look at it form the rear). When I disable all of the wireless devices it has, the temperature decreases a little, but even when sitting idle on the desk with the backlight at it's lowest, it still seems to get warmer than i'd expect it to. Not only does the rear of the device become warm, the metal sides of the case become rather warm as well, and the lower panel with the buttons in it also warms up to about the same temperature.
Could this be a faulty device, or is this actually a recognised feature of the device? (I have an O2 XDA Insignia/Diamond running in GSM mode currently). I have read that others are suffering from warm temperatures, and I'd like to know the cause, even if it's not possible to fix it.
Thanks for any info...
I've got a compact IV and mine runs hot whenever I have tt6 running, suf the net, use youtube - you get the idea -so it's not the battery. It was a lot worse before I flashed a custom ROM.
Before I got my phone I phoned up T-Mobile to check for stock and one of the stores told me that they had to send their stock back for replacement as there were problems with the phone overheating. This was also discussed for the Compact IV on another thread.
I've had my phone for a few weeks and it seems fine - just hot when I run certain programs...
it is a documented aspect of the phone... read this PDF
http://member.america.htc.com/downl..._Diamond/HTC_Diamond_User_Manual_Asia_WWE.pdf
when in idle htc isnt hot at all, but when chatging or using gps it becamo really really hot. but when using wlan,opera,msn,etc it isnt hot even worm, the temperatures are ok.
what he said
3 situations I've noticed mine the warmest.
1 - On charge (with the screen left on)
2 - Running TomTom 7
3 - After a long-ish phone call
It seems the temperature goes in line with the CPU usage and the battery discharge.
Sometimes I can feel the phone being hot in my pocket, even when in standby. I installed a taskmanager to see what application is taking so much CPU power. When I switch it on, I can see the historical CPU usage being around 50% (when the phone was in standby!). Unfortunately it drops immediatly to a reasonable 4-5% and so far I could not identify which application is the cause.
Cheers
Amin
Has anyone fixed that phone's random shutdowns even replacing the battery with a generic one? I want fix that but idk if a generic battery can fix that shutdowns at <30%
I'm have a Xiaomi mi a1 but I'm still love this phone.
I've been suffering with this problem forever now. Actually I just registered to this forum looking to solve this.
What I know so far from my experience & what I've read from brazilian foruns:
-Replacing the battery doesn't fix the problem, maybe gets the % of the shutdown a little down for a while
-Calibrating the battery also doesn't work
-Simply resetting to factory version neither
-Mine will shutdown no matter the %, sometimes even with 90%, so I assume it's lying about the real battery level
-Opening the camera app is almost guaranteed to cause a shutdown, even more if I try to take a pic or film a video. Other apps that take pictures might work properly though
-Switching between the apps too much, conecting to wi-fi, accessing files, waking it up after a long hibernation are also causes of shutdowns for me, so I guess processing too much makes it die
I still don't know if the cause is a hardware or software issue. I mean, my phone has been through some falls, many different chargers & cables (some fake), hasn't received any updates in a long time, nor has been reset. I think it's probably the battery circuit board (is this the correct name?), but if someone has a solution, please let us know.
Also I'm about to root and try to mod something for myself, see if something works.
@fer_cabgar
@HebaoTM
Actually the problem is the battery and the CPU. Whenever the CPU draws current and the battery voltage drops to below 3.0V, the phone shuts down.
Replacing a new battery would fix this but the "new" original battery is suspect because it was all made in 2014, so that's why it doesn't solve the problem
What I did was, I rooted my phone and used "Kernel Tasker" from Google Play to bring down my max cpu from 2.5 to 2.0 and also using this app can change the governor at a specific battery % automatically.
For example at 40%, I set the governor to Powersave. So at 41% I set it back to Interactive.
So now it's auto and my phone doesn't shut down anymore.
You can experiment with what battery %, which governor and what MHz works for your phone.
Bringing down max cpu didnt help for me, i had to change the battery to fix it .