"Why does my phone battery die." Topic

Couple of times now my phone battery has completely drained all of a sudden. Yesterday I unplugged my phone, it had at least 75% charge. Two hours later I pulled it out my pocket (at a tank museum!) and it was dead.

Put it on charge, it was 2o hours before anything happened – literally. I didn't get a charging light until gone 4pm the next day, and when I looked it had 2% charge.

Any ideas. I was in Devon, and it was the Cobberton Tank Collection, where the vehicles are cheek by jowl. Could any of these have caused this?

(It's a HTC Wildfire)

Could be something as simple as a duff battery.

I know mine drains quickly if there's no signal. It will keep looking for a signal which uses a lot of power.

I noticed with mine I have to pull the battery out to reset it every once in a while. When I put the battery back in I will notice I have a bunch more power back as well.

HTC Motorola Atrix.

The biggest reason is what Dn Jackson says.

age is also a factor. Depending on how you charge (do you really unplug it after it's full or do you let it charge all night.) average battery life is about 1 yr. anything after that is gravy.

Try cleaning the contacts or the battery might be fubar. They don't like being recharged if they are not all the way dead.

Every so often I will run it all the way down before recharging, but modern battery technology should mean no 'memory'.

Going to try taking the battery out cleaning the contacts.

What Dn Jackson said.
A phone will try really, really, really hard to get a signal.
I drained a full charge in a couple of hours trying to download some geocaches at Scout Camp…

I've got an iPhone and have never had that happen. My old HTC device did it all the time. Sometimes they get into a loop and the processor just keeps churning.

LH, are there cell phone dead spots where you work? As per DN Jackson…
--
Tim

There's a roaming feature that allows the phone (essentially, it's a small specialized radio) to increase it's transmit strength to max to seek a phone tower. Shut it off and you should be fine.

Thanks everyone, I'm wondering if it was because I was in the middle of Devon, surrounded by big lumps of metal, so the thing went mad trying to connect. It used 10% uploading a holiday pic to facebook earlier this week.

but modern battery technology should mean no 'memory'

sadly no they have made it better even a lot better but not 100% they all slowly stop taking a full charge or giving a full discharge.

LH, metal like that will block signals.. as will organic matter..including leaves on trees.

I worked for Nextel (then mergerd with sprint) for 7 years from 2004 to 2011, and often advised customers on these issues.

some advice:
power cycle (off then back on) every day at least once. it resets our connection to the network and clears errors.

additional times to powercycle:

when your phone has been sitting unused and you haven't been moving around (enough to change towers) for more than 3-4 hours. cell towers direct "traffic", and even though a phone connects to the tower, if its not making calls or using the network, the tower sets it at a lower status level. after all, the bandwidth has to go to phones making calls, using data, etc. powercycling the phone resets the connection to the tower and clears that status.

also when you have been driving around all day. your phone leaves a trail on every cell tower it connects to. As you move around, the towers hand the phone off to the next one in line. when you get a call/text/email/whatever, it tracks the phone by moving down the trail.

BUT.. if your trail goes tower A, B, C B, C, D, A, B.. tehtrail goes A, B,C, B, C, D, A, B , NOT A (start of trail) then B (emd of trail). powercycling the phone clears the trail and resets it, making your incoming calls/texts/emails/tweets/whatever get there faster with less chance of network errors.

Mike, thanks, those are useful details.

What I cant understand is why it takes 24hr before it starts accepting a charge.

Also, are you blue-tooth connected to anything?
I use a Jabra Bluetooth speaker phone attachment on my phone, and notice that the battery life is significantly shorter if I stay connected all day.

I keep the blue tooth off, not having a bluetooth device.

I dropped the ruddy thing a few days ago, back and battery came off. Since then it's charged really slowly, but discharged a lot slower as well – the solution proposed by haywire seems to have worked.