S3 Mini - weird behaviour: sudden battery drops, goes back up after rebooting/plugging in

[Clockwork52]

Recently, I've noticed that the battery on my Galaxy s3 mini is dropping like a stone throughout the day, with only limited use.

For instance, it'd be at 100% when I take if off charge at around 8 in the morning. With browsing a couple of pages infrequently throughout the day (say 2-3 times, no more than 5mins at a time), it would have discharged entirely by around 5:30PM. This is with wireless, location services, syncing, etc all disabled. The biggest battery usage is Android O/S at 30-50%, with other Apps at up to 10%, then screen at around 40%. According to wakelock detector I'm only experiencing around 4% wake time. Screen brightness is set to 25%. Temperature peaks at ~33 when in use and ~25 all other times.

What I noticed was that once the battery reached around 50-40%, it would plummet by around 20%, then gradually decrease until it switched off. To make things even stranger, I noticed that if I restarted the device after this it could report a lower batter usage, but as soon as I plugged it into the charger it would jump back up again.

Yesterday, I managed to get a bit more life out of it by clearing the cache, reaching 70% by the end of the day. As a test, I left it on overnight without charging and it had gone down to 50% by this morning. By midday, it reached that magical spot between 40-50% where it plummets - down to 25% this time. I restarted the device and it reported 15% battery. I restarted device and plugged it into the charger, and it was back up to 40% again.

Has anybody seen this sort of behaviour before? The phone itself is getting on 18months old so I suspect what I'm seeing is the gradual death of the battery?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! It sure sounds like a dying battery. Have you tried a new one?

 

[Clockwork52]

Thanks, and no not yet. I'd have to go purchase a new one as I don't have a spare available.

Anything I should be aware of when trying to get another through eg ebay?

 

[B. Diddy]

Ideally, look for an OEM battery, or one from well-known battery makers like Anker or Seidio. Look for sellers with good ratings and good return policies. Avoid ones that ship directly from outside the US, like China, because of longer shipping times and probably more difficult customer support.

 

[GSDer]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0097...ag=hawk-future-20&ascsubtag=UUacUvbUpU3936940 is for the regular S3 but I'd be surprised if they didn't make a battery for the Mini.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk

 

[Clockwork52]

Well, I think that I figured it out. There's actually two possible solutions:

1) I reset Google Play Services back to factory default, which uninstalled all the google junk like now, +, etc.
2) I disabled something called 'DRM-Protected Content Storage.' I actually think that this was the likely culprit. I had a couple of custom ringtones which I removed from the device whilst fiddling with it yesterday. Now, when I put them back on, this process was activated under 'Media,' and my battery started burning through again. With this disabled, its been holding steady.

 

[B. Diddy]

It may also suggest a corrupt media file somewhere. If you have a corrupt music, photo, or video file, the system's Media Scanner (which looks for files to add to media databases like the Gallery) can get hung up on that file, and use up more battery. Are most of your media files on an SD card? If so, unmount it (in Settings>Storage), and remove it. Keep all of the Google services on, and see if the battery still runs down.

 

[Clockwork52]

Well, sadly, it looks like I spoke too soon. Here's some screenshots of what happened today:








There's gradual power loss and temperature rise throughout the day, tailing off when not in use but still consistently decreasing/rising, however its still pretty positive after 7 hours until around 1 in the afternoon. About that time, I used it for 5mins to browse and visibly saw it decrease by 3% just in that short period (that first sharp dip). Once the battery started tumbling around 2:30, I manually reset the device, but that did not stem the tide - during the period after this, the device is in infrequent use whilst I check the GSam app and switch off various processes (not that there were many running at all). It inexplicably drops from 70-65% at the same time as the temperature spikes, then there's that huge drop off when the device cut out. I've no idea what happened there, except to say that at the time I was syncing contacts through google (After accidentally deleting them - whoops!), the phone ran down some 10% whilst I was doing this in a matter of minutes, and then switched itself off. I couldn't restart the device for a good 15 mins after that.

 

[GSDer]

The drop from ~60% down to about 10% almost instantaneously looks very much like a battery that is shot. That would be my focus.

Sent from my rooted, debloated, deodexed Sinclair ZX-80 running CM -0.001 using Tapatalk