[Q] Bizarre intermittent battery issues - Samsung Galaxy Nexus

I know the GNex doesn't have the best reputation with its battery, but in the past couple of weeks, my phone's battery has been behaving very very strangely, and the problem is very intermittent.
Basically, I am seeing some odd battery drain issues, but there are a number of reported sources from looking at the battery information on the phone. Some behaviors that I have experienced:
1. Screen using 43% of battery with 22 minutes of screen on time.
2. Screen using battery when off.
3. Battery discharging down to almost 0 within an hour after unplugging it from being charged to full - no single app / resource reporting huge usage numbers, just a complete drop on the battery chart.
Other things I have observed; if I catch the system in a state where the battery is draining faster than it should, if I reboot, the system will often recover to normal usage.
I am currently using Paranoid Android 3.15 (I know they have updates - but they also broke their own PIE color scheme, apparently intentionally so, so I am sticking with the last known good version). I am using the stock kernel, and have not tried flashing a new one - if anybody has recommendations, I am all ears.
It is also possible that since this is the original stock battery that the battery itself may be going bad, but my observation about the problem tending to go away after a reboot makes me think the issue is not in the battery itself. I guess the ultimate question is, is there anything that can be done here? Or am I stuck with this until I replace the device in 6 months?

Related

pm8921_bms_low wakelock after battery low warning

Hi! I'm using a gt-I9195 with stock 4.2.2 and arco's kernel. I've got this problem: after I get the battery popup warning, this wakelock pops up and keeps clock frequency at 810 mhz the whole time while idle. The battery drops so fast that after a few minutes the phone already shuts down itself. Sometimes I get the first popup warning (at 15%) and no wakelock, but usually after the second popup (5%) the wakelock appears.
I'd like to use even the last 5-15% of charge. This way, I absolutely have to charge the phone before 15% to be sure that battery won't start to drop like crazy.
I found nothing about this wakelock. What the hell is that??
After some days, I can say that it doesn't pop up always at the same time. Sometimes at 15%, sometimes at 7%, sometimes at 3% etc. And sometimes not at all.
However, EVERY TIME it appears, battery starts to drain like CRAZY. It is not a "regular" wakelock. In 2-5 minutes, battery is died. I keep reaching this low battery levels just for testing purposes... I really don't understand this wakelock.
marchrius said:
After some days, I can say that it doesn't pop up always at the same time. Sometimes at 15%, sometimes at 7%, sometimes at 3% etc. And sometimes not at all.
However, EVERY TIME it appears, battery starts to drain like CRAZY. It is not a "regular" wakelock. In 2-5 minutes, battery is died. I keep reaching this low battery levels just for testing purposes... I really don't understand this wakelock.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not that this will help you any, but seeing as no-one else has responded, just thought I'd let you know you're not alone, and also it's not a problem specific to Arco's kernel - I seem to get the same thing on a completely unmodified S4 Mini.
It suffers from the 'battery drain while idle' bug anyway, for which I'm planning to install Arco's kernel soon, but somewhere between 15% and 5% remaining each time the drain really goes nuts. I can't see the CPU speed, but I've an app installed to monitor and log battery drain in % per hour, and it's usually around 3-4%. After the low battery warning, it jumps to 70-80% an hour, and like yours my phone can go from low battery warning to dead within a few minutes, just sitting idle.
Victoria75001 said:
Not that this will help you any, but seeing as no-one else has responded, just thought I'd let you know you're not alone, and also it's not a problem specific to Arco's kernel - I seem to get the same thing on a completely unmodified S4 Mini.
It suffers from the 'battery drain while idle' bug anyway, for which I'm planning to install Arco's kernel soon, but somewhere between 15% and 5% remaining each time the drain really goes nuts. I can't see the CPU speed, but I've an app installed to monitor and log battery drain in % per hour, and it's usually around 3-4%. After the low battery warning, it jumps to 70-80% an hour, and like yours my phone can go from low battery warning to dead within a few minutes, just sitting idle.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Glad I'm not alone. I assume you're on Jelly bean as well since you're talking about Arco's kernel whch is for JB firmwares as far as I know.
Maybe on KK this weird drain has been patched, some reports from KK stock firmware users would be interesting.
marchrius said:
Glad I'm not alone. I assume you're on Jelly bean as well since you're talking about Arco's kernel whch is for JB firmwares as far as I know.
Maybe on KK this weird drain has been patched, some reports from KK stock firmware users would be interesting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, on JB - I thought it might be a battery calibration issue until I saw your post about the CPU (and until trying to calibrate the battery didn't do any good).
Would be nice if KK fixed it, although it'd probably be by chance - since I can't find any mention of the bug online except in your original post, it doesn't look like it's affecting many people, so doubt if Samsung are even aware of it. Still, fingers crossed!
Yeah, searching pm8921_bms_low gives very little results. For what I understand, usually this is a wakelock of 1 second or less that pops up when there's the battery low warning.
marchrius said:
Yeah, searching pm8921_bms_low gives very little results. For what I understand, usually this is a wakelock of 1 second or less that pops up when there's the battery low warning.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi again! Just wondering if you have any battery saving apps installed? I had one called Battery Doctor installed, and removed it after installing Arco's kernel as I no longer needed it - since then I've let the battery run down to 2-3% on several occasions without seeing any sudden drain. Previously it always seemed to happen me at 5%, and often before that. It might be worth removing any battery related apps just as a test.
Victoria75001 said:
Hi again! Just wondering if you have any battery saving apps installed? I had one called Battery Doctor installed, and removed it after installing Arco's kernel as I no longer needed it - since then I've let the battery run down to 2-3% on several occasions without seeing any sudden drain. Previously it always seemed to happen me at 5%, and often before that. It might be worth removing any battery related apps just as a test.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It might be just luck... otherwise I don't know what to think It happened to me as well to reach 2 or 3% with no battery drain at all, but never regularly.
I don't have battery saving apps (last one I've used was green power two years ago), only greenify but shouldn't make a difference. I read from another forum that plenty of people have this issue, a guy sent his phone to samsung for this specific problem and wrote that he will inform us if they'll solve the problem (honestly, I hope it can be solved by swapping the battery or updating the firmware ).
marchrius said:
It might be just luck... otherwise I don't know what to think It happened to me as well to reach 2 or 3% with no battery drain at all, but never regularly.
I don't have battery saving apps (last one I've used was green power two years ago), only greenify but shouldn't make a difference. I read from another forum that plenty of people have this issue, a guy sent his phone to samsung for this specific problem and wrote that he will inform us if they'll solve the problem (honestly, I hope it can be solved by swapping the battery or updating the firmware ).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That is strange - I was getting it literally every time at 5% if not before, and I still haven't had the issue once since I last posted, I've kept letting the battery get down to 2-3% each time just to test. Oh well, I'll enjoy it while it lasts! Will let you know if the problem reappears, and will be interesting to hear if this other guy gets a solution from Samsung.
I tried to let discharge it again and the drain appeared somewhere between 7 and 6%. I definitely have the issue but I've learned simply to plug it at 20% or more, it is better for the battery too.

Battery issue - Hardware or Software?

Hello,
I am experiencing a rather odd issue since about a week. This is my story:
I am running CyanogenMod on my OPPO Find 7a. I stayed on a build from 2014 (a nightly) that was working okay for me (CM 11, Android KitKat). I decided to update my version last week to the latest CM 12.1 (on Lollipop), and even though I ran in some issues (gapps, update the recovery, etc.), after doing a clean install, it seemed to be fine.
However, just after installing this new build, my problems started: my phone was randomly shutting down (like if no battery was left), but then when plugging it back in I could see it wasn't empty (sometimes it was 20%, sometimes 50%, sometimes as high as 80%). I thought it could be caused by corrupted battery stats, so I tried a bunch of apps and different methods to reset this, without success.
I also tried a factory reset, reinstalling of the ROM, changing the recovery to the cyanogenmod's one, changing back to TWRP (latest 2.8.6.0), wiping the caches, etc. None of this helped.
Today, I decided to install a backup I had from before the installation (a KitKat backup then), to see if the problem came with the new ROM. The phone seemed to work better at first, but after a while I experienced again this sudden shutdown (black screen, phone dead, Android didn't shut it down). So I started to monitor the battery level and voltage, and I noticed something surprising:
When plugged in, the battery voltage is steady at 4300mV. When disconnecting the charger, the voltage is dropping between 3300 and 4100 depending on the charge level (from my understanding, it is a normal behavior). However, as soon as I start using an app that is heavier (for example, Google Maps and jumping from one city to another frequently), I notice that the voltage steadily goes down, and the temperature of the battery goes up.
My conclusion after these tests is that the phone shuts down when the voltage gets lower than 3000mV (something around that value), after few minutes of using a "heavier" app. I checked regularly the temperature, and it didn't go above 30C (it was 26C when idle, I doublt 30C is a problem for a Li-ion battery).
So I have now these questions:
Is this normal that the battery voltage drops when using heavier apps?
Shouldn't the OS handle the load to avoid it to get under the threshold shutting down the phone?
Is it my battery at fault or probably some wrong installation of something? I find it odd that the battery problem appeared EXACTLY at the same time than the Lollipop update I did (and I saw many people having battery issues with this update).
Unfortunately I don't have a second battery to test if it works better, and I'd like to avoid buying one for nothing if possible...
Thanks
EDIT: another weird thing happening, the phone seems to need to restart several time to get in the recovery...
I'm having this problem too. I just got the phone on eBay, and updated to Oppo's Lollipop AOSP beta. Hopefully it is something with a quick software fix. I haven't tried switching ROMs again.
I changed my battery and it fixed the problem. So it was a hardware issue apparently, just odd that it appeared exactly at the same time of the update.
Sangoria said:
I changed my battery and it fixed the problem. So it was a hardware issue apparently, just odd that it appeared exactly at the same time of the update.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah. Your description was a clear indication of a failing battery or (possibly) at least a dirty battery contact.
Batteries will drop in voltage under load, but a healthy Li-Po should only drop a little bit (Probably maybe 100 mV, worst case 200 mV or so under load is my guess, I'd be pretty surprised to see a 200 mV drop from a healthy LiPo under reasonable load). If it's dropping a few hundred millivolts under load, the battery is toast or there's a loose connection.

Horrible battery life on newish S4 Mini ("best" performance <3h)

Hey guys,
after dropping my beloved Nexus 4 to the concrete floor in May, I bought a new S4 mini in the electronic market because of it's decent size and all the fuzz about having a very good price-performance-ratio.
After a few weeks I already was fairly disappointed.
On an average work day (without WiFi) and little use (~30min OSD) the battery wouldn't last a full day. I tried the usual things like turning off GPS, bluetooth and using Wifi whenever possible (turning it off, when not in range), etc. I also used the App greenify which boosted my deepsleep in Wakelock Detector to stable 85+%.
When using GMaps/navigation my phone is getting hot (~50°C) and battery is drained within minutes. When trying to navigate out of the city (<15min navigation) one day my phone was discharged within 3 hours after a full charge. I got Wakelock Detector, Better Battery Stats and Battery Monitor Widget installed.
The only thing I found out, that when I am connected to Wifi the drain is a lot lower 1-2%/hour compared to when I am using 3G/H+ which results in 7-15%/hour (both when not using the phone), although there is no problem with signal quality. Recently my phone started to bottoming out rly hard when hitting the 20% mark. From there I can watch the battery dropping to 0% within a few minutes.
Things I tried so far:
- turning off features that are not in use (GPS, bluetooth, Wifi when not in range)
- make sure phone gets into deep sleep/greenify apps
- recalibrate akku
- reduce brightness & disable auto-brightness
Setup:
GT-I9195 bought in May 2015 from electronic market chain
CM 12.1 (Android 5.1.1, serranoltexx)
Standard CM Kernel
Baseband I9195XXUBML4
I can provide Screenshots from BMW, WD and BBS. Any ideas how to solve this or what else I could do?
Probably you should use something like better battery stats, to check
- if a service is going mad, then turn it off with disable service to test (most times happens with unclean flash)
- if you have an app with wakelocks
If you can't find anything that way, might be a hardware fault.
Personally if I came across this problem I would return the phone to stock Android and do some tests, see if the same happens again. CM12.1 can have issues across different same model phones. Try the Samsung Phone Info app to see how old your phone is. I'm guessing it was second hand? Some older revisions of the Mini had battery problems. Maybe a new battery is needed? Maybe.. As for the battery draining 20%-0% in minutes I have also suffered this on a brand new March 2015 device. Not all the time though it only happens with randomly once a week. But I put that down to the battery not been fully calibrated and then drained and recharged over the next 3 4 days, as I use a spare battery and swap out the batteries regularly which means my battery is very rarely calibrated.
All that said though I can easily get through an entire day if not 2. And using stock I'm able to get 4 and a half hours on average every time, maybe 4 hours of screen on time when using 3G a lot and GPS etc.
NNNexX said:
Hey guys,
When using GMaps/navigation my phone is getting hot (~50°C) and battery is drained within minutes. When trying to navigate out of the city (<15min navigation) one day my phone was discharged within 3 hours after a full charge. I got Wakelock Detector, Better Battery Stats and Battery Monitor Widget installed.
The only thing I found out, that when I am connected to Wifi the drain is a lot lower 1-2%/hour compared to when I am using 3G/H+ which results in 7-15%/hour (both when not using the phone), although there is no problem with signal quality. Recently my phone started to bottoming out rly hard when hitting the 20% mark. From there I can watch the battery dropping to 0% within a few minutes.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have had the same problem as you.
I return twice my phone to vendor. But they could do anything.
I solved it with undervolting and underclocking my phone (only the low frequency).
I read from someone, you can undervolting 150 millivolt.
My experience, is undervolting 125 milivolt. and underclocking the low frequency at the minimum.
You didn't feel any difference, behalves that the phone is cooler and battery live is better.
My WiFi and Bluetooth are always on. I don't have to recharge my phone during the day.
It is so effective en transparent that I don't understand why Samsung didn't do it natively.
Hey,
I tried to apply some of your advice and flashed the newest stock rom for S4 Mini (Kitkat ...COE4).
In that process I recognized that the Baseband is not updated by CM and that the one that was installed when I bought it was fairly old (from 2013). Do you think that this might be part of the problem? (I sort of hate the Samsung Rom)
This week when working and not having Wifi all day, I managed to get 2h of SOT and still had around 25% left which I couldnt have gotten before imo. I only lose 1-4% per hour when the phone is not used. But still thats not pretty good, when ur saying you can get 4h with GPS and everything. I also didnt use GPS. And today when I restarted my phone it just went from 40-ish % to 15% without any reason. Any more ideas?
I installed BetterBatteryStats today and will try to give some more insight the next days. Wakelock detector said that I had 85% deep sleep (timeframe 1 day 2 hours).
Try the Samsung Phone Info app to see how old your phone is. I'm guessing it was second hand? Some older revisions of the Mini had battery problems. Maybe a new battery is needed?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No I bought it new from a electronic store (Media Markt). The app says that is was made on Oct 19th 2014 in Vietnam and that it is original/not refurbished.
How much do you gain by undervolting (SOT or % per hour when idle)?
How do you do it?
maybe the best way is to downgrade by flashing CM11 for example ...
(another way with stock + Alexax kernel + own debloat&freeze ... )
I have the same consumption problem with Resurection Remix LP too ..... very strange !
Lollipop is supposed to be less angry than Android 4.X.X ... but it seem have problem somewhere for our S4-mini sources maybe ,i don't know ...
This night I did some BBS tests:
Setup:
Stock Rom I previously installed (see posts above)
charged phone during evening
set up custom timepoint before I went to sleep
WLAN disabled
all apps greenyfied except those I deemed significant that they keep running (Whatsapp, calendar, Swiftkey, BBS, BMW, etc). Forgot newly installed app hoomn.
I had to upload the logfile to pastebin because it was too long for the xda forum: pastebin.ca/3256568 (I am not allowed to post URLs, sorry)
I lost 14% of battery during 9hrs (-1,6%/h). That's probably not too bad?
93% deep sleep, 33min awake time
Weird things I discovered/things I did not understand:
- negative Voltage loss?
- Wifi runtime 100% although I disabled it
- dominant wakelocks (count > 100, all of them < 30s): Alarm Manager, RILJ1, *net_scheduler*, GCM_CONN, ContextManagerWakeLock, Event Log Service, AlarmManager (com.sec.spp.push.Samsung Push Service), SyncLoopWakeLock, GCM_HB_ALARM
- dominant KWLs (count > 100): ril-fd (25min), bam_dmux_wakelock (13min), radio-interface (7min), PowerManagerService.WakeLocks (3min), mmc1_detect (1min), alarm_rtc, alarm, sec-charger-monitor, smdcntl0, pm8921_soc_lock, power-supply, KeyEvents, smsm_snapshot, qmuxd_port_wl_0, qmuxd_port_wl_1, smdcntl1, mmc0_detect
- Alarms (>20): ccc71.bmw (Battery Monitor Widget), android, com.google.android.gms, com.sec.spp.push
any ideas/assessments?

Random Battery overheat & drain - Software issue or Hardware?

I have a 2 year old S4 Mini (GT19195), currently running latest stable CM 13.
The phone is working fine except for the occasional (once a week or 2) unexplained battery drain.
With my fairly light daily use, the battery is lasting over 2 days. <And can usually run 4 or more hours screen on.> However, in the last few months, at random times (even with phone asleep - screen off for > 10 min, so presumably in doze), the phone will heat up, and battery will drop 5-10% per minute. After the phone shuts off from dead battery, recharging and restarting the phone will return things to normal, until the next time.
During these episodes, the phone behaved normally, I did not notice any lag on waking up the phone, switching/opening apps, etc. The battery meter page showed no unusual process using the battery (none of the process actually showed any increase in % battery use); except for the battery life dropping off a cliff as I watch. <I noted that the battery usage stat never adds up to 100% even in normal use ... It might show 10% screen, 5% Android, etc, but all that only adds up to 50% or so from full charge to when the battery is near dead.>
Anyone seen this before? Is this a sign of an ailing battery, or something else? Can this be a software problem - like something running away in the background? <Of note is that this happened once when I had completely wiped the phone and had the fresh install of CM 13 + Gapps (micro) ... so if this is software, it would be something in stock Android, rather than a 3rd party app.>
Thanks for reading & responding.
@JohnSoong
This sounds like the processor is stuck on max frequency. Either it is an app(s) playing up or some other process that is keeping the CPU working when it should sleep.
The first thing I would do is install BetterBatteryStats app or something similar to see what is keeping the device awake. You could also try to grab a logcat, but you would need to catch the incident and either plug into a pc with adb or run an app like catlog
JohnSoong said:
I have a 2 year old S4 Mini (GT19195), currently running latest stable CM 13.
The phone is working fine except for the occasional (once a week or 2) unexplained battery drain.
With my fairly light daily use, the battery is lasting over 2 days. <And can usually run 4 or more hours screen on.> However, in the last few months, at random times (even with phone asleep - screen off for > 10 min, so presumably in doze), the phone will heat up, and battery will drop 5-10% per minute. After the phone shuts off from dead battery, recharging and restarting the phone will return things to normal, until the next time.
During these episodes, the phone behaved normally, I did not notice any lag on waking up the phone, switching/opening apps, etc. The battery meter page showed no unusual process using the battery (none of the process actually showed any increase in % battery use); except for the battery life dropping off a cliff as I watch. <I noted that the battery usage stat never adds up to 100% even in normal use ... It might show 10% screen, 5% Android, etc, but all that only adds up to 50% or so from full charge to when the battery is near dead.>
Anyone seen this before? Is this a sign of an ailing battery, or something else? Can this be a software problem - like something running away in the background? <Of note is that this happened once when I had completely wiped the phone and had the fresh install of CM 13 + Gapps (micro) ... so if this is software, it would be something in stock Android, rather than a 3rd party app.>
Thanks for reading & responding.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That sounds like an issue I've had for several months, also running CM13 (Official) nightlies & Open GApps micro, unfortunately I've never had the time investigate (well I did once but it worked fine, I couldn't recreate the problem). It is currently happening less than once a week so not a major issue for me.
I've noticed several times that the phone felt hot, I've then used the Trepn profiler app, it would show the web browser running at 30-50% cpu constantly, so stuck as per @noppy22, though not at 100%. I have tried all the major browsers and they have all done it at some point, also most have crashed at some point, which I suspect may be related. Normally just the browser app crashed but yesterday using Chrome the phone FC and rebooted itself. Crashes seem to happen when I touch screen or scroll (though one may not have been when touching). Also XDA app crashed (1st time) when scrolling a couple of weeks ago, so probably not just browser issue on some sites as I thought previously, but might be unrelated. The stock battery meter did not show particularly high battery usage by browsers, though were a little elevated in % terms but hard to tell due to different usage patterns and not checking when things are good! I have noticed a bit of lag, which now makes we run trepn, if it shows high than expected usage by an app I close the app, which fixes it even if I go back to the same web page. This morning I woke up and my phone was off, I put it in my night-time profile (wifi & data off) that normally only uses a few % overnight but last night it must have used more than 30% of battery that was left, first time this has happened.
The other thing to consider is how good is your battery? At 2yrs old it could be tired if it's had a hard life (though yours maybe not) or you have allowed it to get very hot eg I did one trip using gps nav with phone mounted in windscreen cradle driving direct into the Aussie sun when my battery was about 2.5yrs old, thinking back I now think this was when I first noticed my battery was really dropping of quickly when around ~40% charge (though it was faster with more charge remaining also than my new battery, I would say), so think I the high temp the phone got to that day affected the battery. I think 4hrs of screen on time may be marginal, I was only getting about 3 to 3.5 when my battery dropped off fast, my new battery is giving me 6hrs SOT (mostly using browser app), so possibly you just need a new battery as only one other user has reported high cpu usage like I have.
Battery stats not adding up to 100% is normal.
I've just installed BetterBatteryStats, so I'll give it a week of so and see if it catches anything. So far nothing unusual in the stats.
I am leaning towards this being a hardware issue, likely the battery. Since the phone responded fairly normally during the overheat & battery drain episodes, this does not seem to me an app taking over the CPU. If the CPU was occupied by an app, shouldn't everything else be slowed down?
I have so far noticed no particular pattern to these episodes, and I cannot reproduce it at will. It is infrequent enough for now that I can live with it (although an unexpected dead battery is annoying.) I will see if the monitoring app pick up anything.
Hey guys,
Maybe you have to try to flash your stock or custom kernel again.
Thats probably the problem.
Xheers
When I got mine a few years ago the media process kept getting stuck and overheating/draining my phone and even a reboot wouldnt fix it. I found out because I was using the system panel app and monitoring cpu of system processes. I ditched and deleted the gallery app (it was trying to create thumbnails for 100+gb of photos and videos) for quick pic v.4.5.2 on every phone I've used ever since and haven't look back.

Question Overall bad battery life

Anyone experiencing battery drain despite not using the phone intensively? I have mine for two weeks now and the battery life is kind of bad.
I disabled many apps using Universal Android Debloater and it improved, but it's still kinda bad compared to my previous Realme phone(which also had 5000mah battery).
The phone gets warm when I'm using it, so I think it might be the rom that's not well optimised or maybe it is still bloated?
Me too Today.
1 Reboot,
2 Close all apps
3 Uninstall new app.
I hope to solve the problem!
Edit: [Problem solved]
It drops a bit overnight, that is true. But after a working day with 20-30 phonecalls and about an hour of Youtube I still have 60% battery in the evening which is in the top range of any smartphone I owned.
Battery drain can be from just about anything. Any background app including 3rd party ones that go wrong can create major battery drain.
Some people replace devices to try to solve it.
There's a whole bunch of things you can try though and look into. Nothing here may be easy.
My last Samsung would battery drain unless I rebooted 1-3 times every few days. My A53 has zero battery drain problems. Its likely the A54 should be fine too.
It is.

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