More than just a battery problem?

[kasyl]

Hi there,

So my Nexus 4 that I inherited from my brother has slowly developed some massive problems to the point of being unusable. At first, I suspected it was the battery, but after replacing the battery I realized that wasn't the only problem.

It all started with the phone randomly shutting down at power levels of like 30% and as high as 50%. After shutting down, I could usually restart the phone, but it would typically automatically and suddenly power off again during the boot process.

Later, this problem became even worse, to the point that the phone would no longer turn on at all (this also coincided with me moving to China, interestingly enough). It had gotten to the point that plugging the phone into any charger on the wall or into my computer would result in the solid red light of death and absolutely no change regardless of how long it was left charging. The phone would either not turn on at all, or turn on for a few seconds before shutting down.

So then I replaced the battery. The new battery got the phone booted up immediately. I was able to use the phone for 1 day and then charged it once before the problems arose again. This time, the phone died at 92% battery and refused to turn on again.

Now, with the new battery, the phone doesn't bring up the red light of death, but it will not turn on regardless of whether or not it's plugged in or not. Actually, that's not true either though, because I was able to randomly turn it on just today (after letting it sit idly off the charger for 1.5 days) and it booted up completely. It claimed the battery was at 10%, and then upon plugging it in it "charged" to 90% within less than 30 minutes.

So clearly something more is wrong here. I feel like I've seen someone mention that there can be issues with the "power management" hardware/software or something. Oh, and I did do 1 factory reset on it to see if it is/isn't software related (during the time when it randomly decided to stay alive). No changes there.

Any ideas? Hope? I'll probably be grabbing a cheap Chinese phone in the mean time as a stop-gap.

 

[CoMoNexus]

I feel like I've seen someone mention that there can be issues the "power management" hardware or something.

I'd like to hear more about that. One problem I've been having the past few months is that the screen won't turn on, but I know the phone is functioning because the LED still slowly flashes white to indicate notifications. This happens even when the battery is full or nearly full, and when I reboot the phone -- by holding down the power button for ~15 seconds -- there's still plenty of juice left. Sometimes it happens when it's in airplane mode, and sometimes it happens when the cellular and Wi-Fi radios are turned on.

I can't live with this because I'm dropping my landline due to non-use, so my mobile phone always has to be ready to go. Plus I use it as an alarm clock at night.