My Nexus One Battery Adventure
As I’ve tweeted about, probably all too much, I’ve been having issues with my new Nexus One. I love the phone and it has yet to leave me wanting, if it weren’t for one thing, the battery.
I’ve been having issues where the phone’s battery is well charged and then without notice, the charge drops to zero. A few days go it went one worse, after falling off the power cliff, it would not charge. It just stuck at 2%. I went to sleep figuring I always had my iPhone to fall back on in the morning. When I woke up it was at 100% charged.
Just prior to this happening I decided to get an application to see if I can find out any information about what’s going on. After a bit of poking about in the Android Marketplace, I found the excellent Battery Graph app. After letting it run around for a few days I exported the data and made this graph in Excel:
You can see the event I described above on the left side of the graph, showing the cliff happening sometime around 8 pm on January 31st and sometime around 5:30 am where it decided to go from 2% to 100% charge. You can then see a full days normal use for yesterday, without incident. The graph looks a little odd because I was sampling at 1 minute and then slowed the sample rate to 5 minutes.
I’ve been trying all sorts of different things with the phone to see if it was related to changing cell modes between 2G and 3G, some sort of background application running, or what not, with no success. I went as far as to call HTC support about this last week.
I had only contacted HTC after I opened a ticket with Google. The Google support email, which came in two or three days after I sent in the request, told me to contact HTC and get a warranty replacement. I went to the HTC site to begin the process and noticed that for HTC warranty replacement of the Nexus One, they send you a new phone without a battery. You are to use the battery that came with the original phone.
HTC support had acted as if they had never heard of such an issue before and told me they needed to bump it up to the next support level and that someone from HTC would contact me within a few days. It’s now been a few days, and as you can see from the graph above, my Nexus One had another battery event this afternoon. Fortunately it decided after 10-15 minutes of charging that it was 100% charged, so I’m guessing at this point the problem is either in the battery charge sensor itself or in the Android firmware. Here’s hoping the next revision of the firmware, just announced, will fix my issue.
