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...
Hi there,
I have a huge problem with my Diamond..
Since I went to the Alps in christmas, (local temperatures where about -8 degrees celcius(phone can handle this I hope))
whenever I make use of consuming programs (i.e.: Opera, TouchTwit, Windows Live Messenger, whatever..) My phone just turns off ? random times.. mostly after using the program for like 2 minutes.. not more than 2 mins.
Anyway, I restart my phone, it says Battery almost empty?! what the.. I just plugged it out of my recharger? if my battery gets below 5% it shuts down again and again, after few restarts it was fixed, and battery was back normal. (When phone is connected to recharger, there's no problem with any of these applications
Now my question is, since I have no warranty (Hard-spl)
What to do now?
Thanks for helping me out already
(btw: it's with every ROM I use and I have never had this issue before..)
Update: I just ordered a new battery 1340 mAh, hope this will solve it, Im running official Dutch Rom from htc website at the moment, its definitly not a rom problem, cause it shuts down also
have you found a solution yet?
i seem to have exactly the same problem...
the phone shut's down and there is always only 5% battery life remaining
i get the idea it has something to do with the internet connection, cause it always happens when i browse or use outlook
so i tried updating the radio rom, but that did not fix it
i will try it with tomtom or anything that uses a lot of memory without internet, see what happens...
i hope you have already found solution, and are willing to share it!
Edit:
It seems to have nothing to do with the memory consuming of the apps.
When i run tomtom for example, it runs fine and the phone does not shut down.
When i exit the app, and run quickgps and let it download the gps-data from the internet, the phone shut's down after a few seconds.
So maybe i do have a different problem...
Anyone have a suggestion on how to fix it? It happens with different ROMs and Radio versions.
I have searched "soft reset" but couldn't find anything related. I am using the Official HTC Diamond 2 ROM (2.16.405.4 (67041) WWE, Radio 4.49.25.17) on HTC Pure, which was bought about three weeks ago. I need to soft reset it after using it for 4-5 days when the memory useage reaches about 74% or so, or I couldn't turn it on (the power switch dosn't respond). Is this normal for HTC Pure?
Before the memory usage reaches 74% or so, I noted that sometimes the memory was "released" and returned back to 67% or so, which is nice. But the "lock up" (can't be turned on without a soft reset) eventually hits as the memory reaches 74% again. Thank you in advance for advice
I had the same problem when I first bought my Pure. I'd have to take out the battery to reset the phone if I left it on for more than a few days straight. That was until I downloaded a great little app called "cleanRAM" that frees up memory. It's totally customizable and you can even set it to run on a schedule. I set it up to run at the highest level every day at 3AM, and when I notice the phone getting sluggish I just run it manually. It takes all of 30 seconds to complete and frees up tons of memory.
Thanks much, eldavar. CleanRAM did a good job in relaxing RAMS; indeed, but it also wiped out the GPS data. Even after a number of soft resets and downloads of QuickGPS for the fresh data, I still couldn't get the satellites to be locked upon for GPS. I used level 1 (the default) in CleanRAM. I tried for almost an hour.
I did a hard reset to recover the manufacturer's setting to bring back the GPS. One should be careful in cleaning RAMS don't you think. There are RAMS cleaners that do not affect the GPS as much, but the overall response of the phone may become slow.
tzour said:
Thanks much, eldavar. CleanRAM did a good job in relaxing RAMS; indeed, but it also wiped out the GPS data. Even after a number of soft resets and downloads of QuickGPS for the fresh data, I still couldn't get the satellites to be locked upon for GPS. I used level 1 (the default) in CleanRAM. I tried for almost an hour.
I did a hard reset to recover the manufacturer's setting to bring back the GPS. One should be careful in cleaning RAMS don't you think. There are RAMS cleaners that do not affect the GPS as much, but the overall response of the phone may become slow.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's unusual. I use the GPS quite a bit with my phone, lots of different apps (like GPSed, Glympse, foursquare, Google Maps, etc.). I've never had a problem getting the satelite lock after running the cleanRAM program. I wouldn't know what to tell you about that because it's not an issue I've experienced.
After updating to 2.3.3 using COS-DS, my phone seemed to work fine. I initially had a battery drain with nothing taking up large battery usage, so I reset the battery stats and all was well.
However, after unplugging my phone from charging all night (100% upon unplug), I checked my phone two hours later and saw that my charge was down to 22%. Upon checking Battery Usage, I found that Android OS is using 76%! The only thing I've done today was answer a couple SMS messages. I don't have Sync, GPS, or Wifi on, but I do have Mobiledata and 3G+2G on, as well as Background Data. The only widget I have is Google Voice, which I've removed to no avail. I've tried rebooting (twice), but it stays the same. I've turned off data, gone to 2G-only, and turned off background data, and it still continues. In Spare Parts, under Battery history it says that the only thing using up the battery is Suspend in CPU, and Battery Status says that the battery's health is good. Something really strange is that after the initial power-off upon the discovery of this issue, I immediately plugged it into the charger. After about 3 minutes I turned it back on, and found that it's already charged back up to 86%. WHAT.
Also, I haven't plugged it into the computer once in the last few days, so it's not USB-bug related. Any ideas on what's going on here?
EDIT: Ok, it's been a couple hours since this began, but just now I checked the phone (it was on the charger) and suddenly EVERYTHING is gone from the Battery Usage page, save for Display and Android OS, and Android OS is back down to 5% now. Really bloody weird, but the issue seems to have resolved itself.
I've had similar issues. When my battery runs flat, dead. I plug it up and switched it on, and it shown "Charging (32%)". I get different but similar results with different ROMs. It could simply mean the battery is wasted couldn't it?
Have you gone into the Recovery mode and wipe the Battery Status? I was having similiar issue (but not a fast drain), I did maybe about 5 wiped and reboot the phone. My problem seem to go away.
I went from 1 day or less from 100% to having to recharge, to 2 and 1/2 days then charge.
The issue came back later that night, and has been happening ever since.
I've done the bump charge + stats wipe, where I let it charge to 100%, shutdown until green LED, wipe stats, restart, let drain to 0, restart and use. I've tried this about 3 or 4 times, and the issue persists. I've removed my 2 widgets (two sound effects widgets), and it persists.
Also, I've downloaded OS Monitor, and it shows the CPU to be resting at its min, 246.
I'm hoping it's just the battery at this point, and have already ordered another one. I'll let you guys know if that fixes it.
In that case it might be your battery that need to be replace. How old is the battery?
I really have no idea. I bought this G1 used on eBay 9 months ago.
2 things to note:
1. It actually stopped booting last night even while on the charger: I restarted, and it kept getting stuck on the splash image. So I superwiped, reflashed, and the drain is still there even with no user-installed apps.
2. About a month ago, (when I was back on a stable Froyo, which I had been on since I got the phone 9 months ago) it started to randomly shut off. It seemed like if it got just a little too hot (battery got to maybe 30 C, never was able to check what the temp was when this happened), it would shut down and wouldn't get past the boot screen without a reset. I had to either charge it or wait an hour for it to successfully boot again.
In retrospect, this is sounding more and more like the battery. The only thing that's strange is that Android OS takes up such high percentage. Oh well, hopefully the new battery gets here today or tomorrow, hopefully that fixes everything.
Since you have brought the G1 9 months ago, more than likely it's had been over two year or more (about the same age as mine more or less). I doubt that the seller would be giving you a brand new battery.
I noticed the reboot on mine G1 too. Ever so often, my G1 will reboot on me. But I do not have the problem getting stuck at the splash or boot screen. But then I am using the SuperAosp ROM not Froyo.
Let me know how the new battery will work out, I might have to end up getting it myself. Eventhough my battery life got better after I did the wipe battery status, sometime it still drain depending on the day I guess.
I noticed the same result with COSDS.
I moved to Ginger Yoshi with much better results.
Better, but not as good as stock, obviously.
COSDS turned into a real hog on me by the time the second or third reboot happened.
Heeter
I'll stay with SuperAosp, I take the performance over the battery life any day. My battery status an't that bad. Once in the while I used it up in a day or less, other I can stick around for a few days.
The rebooting part was not too bad on my end. Just once in a while. Nothing I can't handle.
@ psychosonic - You might want to try that if you want, Gingerbread Yoshi was one of my first choice before I found what I had.
Alright, got my battery. After calibrating it for one day, then using it today post-calibration, it's functioning phenomenally. After using wifi + internet for a period of time, and sms throughout the day, it's still at 70% 6 hours after charge. Essentially, the only thing that drains the battery is heavy internet use, which seems to make it go down 1% per 2 or 3 minutes.
Internet usage seem to take a lot out of the battery for sure. I know mine take a lot more than 1% every 2 or 3 mins when I use my internet.
Let see how will the new battery pan out. See if it will last you 2 or more days. Keep using it as such, and see where it goes.
Android OS Battery bug
Hi!
1. Install SystemPanelLite Task Manager from the market.
2. Run SystemPanel and open settings and check the "System processes" option. Close settings.
3. Scroll down in the process list until you find the process "android.process.media". If you have a CPU usage of more then 10-30s and the process usage gauge to the left moves up and down you probably have the Android OS battery bug.
At this point you can try the following;
- Shut down your phone. (Not just turn it of. The complete shut-down-power-off-thingy)
- Remove your external SD card.
- Start up your phone again.
- When the scan media is complete, do step 3 above again. If you don't see the problem at step 3 your SD card has a corrupt filesystem. And needs to be reformated. Follow these steps;
- Backup your data first!!!
- Settings -> SD card & phone storage
- Unmount SD card
- Format SD card
- Restore files from your backup.
If the problem persists your internal SD card might have a corrupt filesystem and needs to be reformated. Follow these steps;
- Backup your data first!!!
- Settings -> SD card & phone storage
- Format internal storage
- Restore files from your backup.
More details; What happens when you have a corrupt filesystem is that android.process.media tries to read a file but fails over and over again. The filesystem might not look corrupt to you. And you can read and write files on the SD card without problems. But at some point the android.process.media failes to read the files and loops like crazy, draining your battery.
I had a corrupt filesystem (FAT32) on my external SD card. I also had Android OS battery usage of 60-70% and a fast draining battery. I hope this can help others.
Best regards,
/Pontus
cos & yoshi
cos dds sucks battery.... yoshi"s awesome..!! fr battery!!
if you applied a theme in theme chooser it could have affected it