My wife and I have both seen this in the last couple weeks on our E4GTs. With both phones, it has only been since upgrading to ICS, though she's stock non-rooted and I'm on CM9 Alpha 6. It's not always a shut down, it's just a severe drop in battery. Once I went from 70% to about 10%, prompting the phone to give me a low battery warning. In that case, I just waited it out and sure enough, the battery % started steadily climbing back up into the 60's without plugging it in.
It can be super frustrating when it drops low enough for the phone to shut itself down. You then have to wait until it sorts itself out enough to turn the phone back on. If this happens at an inopportune moment, when you were extra careful to make sure you had plenty of charge (waiting for an important call/text, navigating somewhere new, using phone for shopping list) it really makes you question the value of having a smart phone at all!
Neither of our batteries have the bulge issue, so it seems like it must be a bug in the h/w or s/w that reads the battery level. The weird part is that it drops immediately but then takes quite a while to get back to the real level. Almost as if there is a built-in limit on how large of an increase it will report but no such limit on how large a decrease it can report.
A couple times it has happened to me, I've noticed the phone was quite warm. At the time I thought maybe some process was stuck in a loop or continuously retrying to download something, so I did a reboot to clear everything out. When the OS finished booting, the battery level dropped. Doesn't always seem to happen this way, so I'm not sure if it's valid evidence or not.
If nothing else, the battery graph is entertaining. Battery slowing decreasing, then a steep cliff and gradual rise that looks like the battery charging, but the bar for charging at the bottom is empty the whole time.
If someone figures out how to fix this, please let us know!
I've had a couple of the 'ICS related' shutdowns also, and this wasn't the same. Definitely got the low battery warning, and then when attempting to restart it wouldn't complete... just like a low battery. It wouldn't restart normally until I plugged it in, at which point it showed to still have 66%
My wife and I have both seen this in the last couple weeks on our E4GTs. With both phones, it has only been since upgrading to ICS, though she's stock non-rooted and I'm on CM9 Alpha 6. It's not always a shut down, it's just a severe drop in battery. Once I went from 70% to about 10%, prompting the phone to give me a low battery warning. In that case, I just waited it out and sure enough, the battery % started steadily climbing back up into the 60's without plugging it in.
