Dead battery???

[doc]

My Mio 168's battery will drain down in about 48 hours of not charging it. Even when it's not being used. I've made sure the IR port is turned off. Is there anything else I should be looking for that's draining the battery?

How can I check the battery to see if it needs a new one? Before spending $40 on a new one I'd like to make sure that is the problem.

Thanks in advance guys.

[Andy Whiteford]

Can you take a backup of it, do a hard reset then fully charge the battery and see how it performs on a completely clean device. If it does not discharge so fast, it may be some piece of software running that is draining the battery. If the problem remains, chances are the battery is goosed or worst case scenario, although unlikely, the device itself has a defect causing the battery to discharge.

[doc]

Within 48 hours the battery will drain down enough to completely reset the PDA. What I've been doing is just using a last know good backup from there.

The only software I have installed on this device is
MS Extended DST update
Battery Pack Pro
PocketBible
Mapopolis
Mobipocket Reader
Stowaway Keyboard and mouse driver
Spb Backup

[Andy Whiteford]

When you say last known good backup - do you mean a backup with no battery drain?

[doc]

Unfortunately no. That would be too easy. This is a backup I took once I had the PDA the way I wanted it.

I'll have to hard reset it to see if it drains down.

[Andy Whiteford]

Well if you have a good backup, I would suggest a hard reset, don't install anything and then see if the battery drain remains. If it does then it is a defect, most likely with the battery itself and worth replacing. If there is no drain then it will be some setting in software that is causing this.

[Jason Dunn]

A+ on the troubleshooting Andy! :way to go:

[Andy Whiteford]

Doc, any update on your battery issue?

[doc]

I've been working in Portland the past few weeks and have not been home in Indianapolis. This was for my wife's PDA.

As far as I know performing a manual hard reset then recovering from my SBSH Backup has worked without uninstalling anything. The PDA went 3 days with no charge and still showed 100% charge before I left for Portland.

For some reason when I recover from backup after the battery drain reset was not doing the same thing.

[rookcnu]

I am having the exact issue that Andy describes in the previous post:
Well if you have a good backup, I would suggest a hard reset, don't install anything and then see if the battery drain remains. If it does then it is a defect, most likely with the battery itself and worth replacing. If there is no drain then it will be some setting in software that is causing this.

This did not become a problem for me the first 16 months of having my phone (Cingular 8125), but the last two weeks the phone will die and soft reset even at 95% battery in the middle of a conversation. Never did this until two weeks ago. Did the hard reset and have nothing on the unit for the last week and it still does it.

I guess this means my battery needs to be replaced?

How long should a battery for a Cingular 8125 last? Is 16 months about right?

[LegacyHH]

Any chance you had installed any new applications about 2 weeks ago? We had a similar thread a while back, and it turned out to be software that was causing the problem. I believe in that case it was 3rd party alarm software.

Good luck,

[Andy Whiteford]

I've been working in Portland the past few weeks and have not been home in Indianapolis. This was for my wife's PDA.

As far as I know performing a manual hard reset then recovering from my SBSH Backup has worked without uninstalling anything. The PDA went 3 days with no charge and still showed 100% charge before I left for Portland.

For some reason when I recover from backup after the battery drain reset was not doing the same thing.


The battery drain will only soft reset the device, not hard reset. It sounds like the hard reset has done the trick and saved you the cost of a replacement battery. :)

[Andy Whiteford]

I am having the exact issue that Andy describes in the previous post:
Well if you have a good backup, I would suggest a hard reset, don't install anything and then see if the battery drain remains. If it does then it is a defect, most likely with the battery itself and worth replacing. If there is no drain then it will be some setting in software that is causing this.

This did not become a problem for me the first 16 months of having my phone (Cingular 8125), but the last two weeks the phone will die and soft reset even at 95% battery in the middle of a conversation. Never did this until two weeks ago. Did the hard reset and have nothing on the unit for the last week and it still does it.

I guess this means my battery needs to be replaced?

How long should a battery for a Cingular 8125 last? Is 16 months about right?


It sure sounds like the battery is defective although it would be good to try another battery first just to confirm this since you are saying the battery does not appear to be draining fast i.e. it is still showing 95% remaining. What happens if you plug the phone into the mains, can you make a long call without any issues? If it is okay on mains power then there is a good chance it is the battery. If you use your device intensively and always recharging then battery fatigue at anything over 12 months is not uncommon.
One other thing to try, after it dies and resets, can you power it up and use it or do you need to recharge the battery before you can use it? I'm just trying to establish if the battery has in fact drained or not.

[rookcnu]

LegacyHH wrote:
Any chance you had installed any new applications about 2 weeks ago? We had a similar thread a while back, and it turned out to be software that was causing the problem. I believe in that case it was 3rd party alarm software.

Yes I did. I do not want to call out the company who makes the product, though. But I did a hard reset to go back to a clean unit. I have been running that clean unit without installing anything or syncing my contacts, calendar, tasks, etc. with my desktop for the last two weeks and still having the battery issues.

Andy Whiteford wrote:
It sure sounds like the battery is defective although it would be good to try another battery first just to confirm this since you are saying the battery does not appear to be draining fast i.e. it is still showing 95% remaining. What happens if you plug the phone into the mains, can you make a long call without any issues? If it is okay on mains power then there is a good chance it is the battery. If you use your device intensively and always recharging then battery fatigue at anything over 12 months is not uncommon.
One other thing to try, after it dies and resets, can you power it up and use it or do you need to recharge the battery before you can use it? I'm just trying to establish if the battery has in fact drained or not.

Well,... the battery does drain fast on processor heavy activities (i.e. 100% to 10% in five minutes). It will do a soft reset and when it comes back on, it will show 10%, but if I soft reset again, sometimes it will come back on saying almost 100% again. It is very strange.

Then other times, I will be in a phone conversation and I will have 50% or more and be in the middle of a conversation and it will just soft reset on me in the middle of the conversation. It then tries to reboot, but it won't. It will bring up the screen asking me for my password to turn on my phone feature, and when I hit enter, it will die again. Then it will soft reset and reboot again and then it sets off this chime like tone that I have never heard before. This happens every day.

As for trying all this stuff while the phone is plugged in to a charger,... I have not tried that, but I will and see what happens.

[doc]

Actually, before doing a manual hard reset the battery would drain down in a couple days time to the point that it would hard reset the device. From there I would have to run the last backup. Two days later, rinse repeat.

Now, if I do the manual hard reset myself then all appeared to be normal after restoring the backup. No more battery drain issues. Weird.

[Andy Whiteford]

Based on what you have said above, it does sound like a defective battery. If you are having the problems after a hard reset without installing anything then it is not software related. The fact you have been trouble free for over a year rules out an issue with the software in ROM unless of course this was upgraded recently?