Having a battery problem with Droid

[StingrayJG]

Here's what just happened today and is still happening now.

I charged the phone until it was fully charged.
Disconnected it, put it on my belt and drove to work.
No more than 25 minutes later, I went to unlock the phone and i noticed the red light was blinking (never saw that before)
When I unlocked the phone, I got a break message on the screen saying something to the effect of "Your phone has less than 5% charge remaining, connect charger to phone"
I killed the screen right away and when I got to a desk area where I could set up the phone laid out on the desk with the charging wire, I set it up to charge.
When I plugged in the charger, the phones display came on and said "Charging (60%)" (what happened to the 5% charge left?)
I still haven't gotten to the baffling part yet....
Now I've had it charging for over 90 minutes and it has not moved off of "Charging (60%)" Any other time but today it would've for sure been 100% charged by then.
The little battery symbol in the notification bar is showing the "filling up" charging graphic with the little lightning bolt inside it, but the words on the screen have not moved off of "Charging (60%)" at all yet.
This is concerning to me and has never happened before until today. I bought it March 19th and this is the first "issue" I've had with it.
So, right now I really don't know how much juice is really in there.
Has anyone encountered anything like this before?
And why did I get the 5% warning message and then as soon as I plugged the charger it said 60% (??)
Just some other info to consider. I kill all apps almost immediately with Advanced Task Killer Free. The only things that should've been open at the time were email and messaging, I killed everything else just before the house charge. So there should not have have been any major power sucks happening.

Anyone have any ideas here? I'm approaching close to 2 hrs on charge and it still says "Charging (60%)" Any advice is appreciated.

 

[StingrayJG]

update to this.
I just turned the phone off and back on again and now it's showing fully charged.
Things seem to be OK again but I still have no explanation why that just happened.
Anyone else have ideas?

 

[mcgeorge36]

I guess some questions might be are you rooted or not? Are you using an extended life battery or the stock battery?

 

[StingrayJG]

I guess some questions might be are you rooted or not? Are you using an extended life battery or the stock battery?

Sorry to sound stupid but how do I tell if I'm rooted or not? I'm still learning a lot when it comes to this phone. I have the battery it came with.

 

[PJnc284]

If you were, you'd know since you have to either boot into recovery and do it or use a program like DM Updater. Do you see an app named Superuser Permission with a little black ninja in your app drawer?

 

[StingrayJG]

If it's something you have to deliberately do like that then I can tell you then that I'm certainly not rooted.

 

[mcgeorge36]

I'm not that experienced with it, but the only time I have ever heard of anything like that happening was if someone had their phone rooted or they bought one of the extended batteries. It could just be a random thing, or it could just be a bad battery overall. I have had my droid for a while, and my battery runs like a champ. If it keeps up, maybe take it back into a Verizon store or something and see if they can do anything for you.

 

[PJnc284]

Unplug it, take the battery out, wait about 30 sec and put it back in. Then plug it back into the charger and see what it does. Also might want to get rid of ATK as some people have reported it doing wonky things to the phone. The Android OS is fairly good at managing memory. I've had mine for 4 months and haven't installed any sort of task manager and it's run perfectly on the stock and custom over-clocked roms. If it's still acting up tomorrow after a good nights charge definitely take it back to verizon especially since you're still within your 30 days.

 

[StingrayJG]

Since it's been OK since I turned it off and back on, I'm hopeful that maybe it was just a freak thing. I'll keep you informed.

 

[Knyte]

I have this exact same issue on 2 droids(3 if you count the one i returned).. it's an intermittent issue as it can happen 2 days from now or 2 weeks. I have contacted Verizon about it and Motorola. Moto sent me a new battery under the assumption that was the problem. Well it wasn't a and I just had it happen using the new battery. I really think this is software issue and Google needs to be made aware of it.

The way StingrayJG described is exactly what to look for.. my phone hasn't been charged for 19 hours and was at 60%, then BAM the red light begins to flash telling me to charge it up as it was now at 5% or less. Once I plugged it in, I did not walk away and made sure the phone didn't go into standby mode to watch the charging % jump from 5 to 60 in about 10 seconds.

 

[CharlieL3]

Unplug it, take the battery out, wait about 30 sec and put it back in.

You never have to do this on a Droid unless it is completely non-responsive.

I have had the same battery problem twice in the five months I have owned a Droid. The first time it happened was in January, and the second time was earlier this week. I don't know what causes it, but turning the phone off and on again does away with the battery reporting error.

 

[StingrayJG]

Sorry for the thread bump here but just an FYI, this happened again to me yesterday. Out of the clear blue with plenty of battery, the phone gave the ringtone for new email and when I went to look at it, the phone was doing the same thing as in post #1 here. All I had to do was power off the phone and turn it back on again and it was fine. Went right back up to prior battery strength, 80-90%. I still have no explanation why it's happening. Since it's relatively easy to solve it's more an annoyance than anything at this point. I'd just like to know if it's something I can prevent but so far both times it's happened to me, I wasn't even in the act of using the phone. Hmmm.

 

[Sundown1]

I've been having the same problem, probably 4-5 times in 3 months. Another way it resets the meter is just by plugging it back in. Mine will usually show 5% then plug it in and it is back to where it should be 60%+.