
Some Google Pixel devices shutting down at 30% battery - sergiotapia
http://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-shutting-30-battery-738777/
======
mancerayder
It's strange irony that I happened on this link after searching around for a
replacement for my 5X, and heading back to HackerNews for a little break.

The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use, and the battery is a
catastrophe, requiring me to remember to not forget my anker portable battery,
which I also have to remember to not forget to keep charged.

I bought the iPhone 7 but the reception on it was so awful, I'm returning it.
I've been looking at alternatives and the landscape is ugly: the Samsung S7
has rave reviews but we all know they don't update the software with any
attempt at haste or frequency. The Pixel is beyond a joke, given its high
pricepoint with a featureset that has 'Google Assistant' as the top
bulletpoint.

What in the world happened to the phone market that the choices have gotten so
dismal? We used to have more variety. We used to have swappable batteries,
keyboards, etc. Now it's all the same garbage with designs copied between the
hardware vendors.

I'm baffled.

~~~
avar
> The 5X has slowed to a crawl after a year of use.

I ordered mine in November 2015 and it still works just as fine. Just as fast,
if not faster with the Android updates, and the battery still lasts around a
day and a half, i.e. usually 20-40% when I plug it in to charge at night.

~~~
barrkel
I also have a 5X. If I'm moving, the battery runs out at about 20% an hour. I
normally charge mine in the evening, so it's at 100% at midnight, about 90% in
the morning, about 70% after my commute, and around 40% by the evening. It'll
be somewhere in the 10 to 20% range by the time I get back home, often with
the battery saver active.

During the work day, I generally only use it to check headlines at lunch. I
also use it to play back mp3s over bluetooth to my motorycle helmet. The
screen is typically on during the day for less than an hour.

The 5X is slower than the Nexus 5 it replaced - 50% more cores but they run
slower and most apps take longer to start up. It's a mediocre device and the
battery life is not good at all.

Right now, the biggest drains, after screen at 12%, are Google Play services,
Android System, Android OS and Mobile standby.

I have a theory that it's Google's appetite for data that kills battery life.
They make it hard to use the phone with location services turned off or in
battery saving mode except when you want a location in Maps. When you want
your location, it gets turned on and stays on. There's no easy way to keep it
on to a minimum. I think it's a strategic goal of Google to use customer data
for everything from location popularity to traffic, and they're willing to
sacrifice customer batteries with nudging defaults to get there.

~~~
Fiahil
Listening to Spotify with a bluetooth headset is by far my biggest drain on
the 5X (~40% per hour). I've come to use the jack cable more and more, and now
it's okay[0]. Luckily, I'm not an iPhone 7 user.

[0] "okay" yes, but if people at Spotify would spend more time on battery and
network issues than moving menus to weird places, I would be happier.
Alternatives are worst, so it's just a matter of giving them money until they
work on something you consider useful. As a consumer, this is infuriating.

~~~
rbrcurtis
FWIW, I have a iphone 7, and I use bluetooth literally all day listening to
audio books. My battery doesn't really seem to be impacted significantly.

------
nradov
I have seen the same symptom on Samsung devices with degraded batteries. With
a new battery it will go all the way to 0% before shutting down. Then as the
battery gradually degrades it will shut down with _no warning_ at 5%, 10%,
20%, and so on. But when you get close to that limit the point where it
actually shuts down depends heavily on power consumption at the time. It might
have been able to keep running fine for a while but as soon as you launch a
power intensive app such as the camera it will immediately die.

My theory is that the degraded battery is still able to deliver enough power
at full charge. But then as it discharges the maximum amount of power it can
deliver gradually declines. This works fine for a while until it hits a
threshold, and then a protection circuit trips to prevent further damage to
the battery by shutting down.

Of course if you have a removable battery this is only a momentary
inconvenience. Just slap in a fresh one and you're working again in less than
1 minute.

~~~
bmm6o
I've had the same experience and I came up with the same hypothesis. It
started happening just when Pokemon Go was popular, so I had a lot of
opportunity to collect data. At first I knew I had to quit the app and turn
off GPS when I saw the 25% alert. Then after some time it would shutdown
before it showed the 25% alert. Eventually it started dying closer to 50%.
Replacing the battery has helped a lot, and with the better capacity I'm
getting down to 25% less frequently.

~~~
extrapickles
When a battery is as its discharged, its ESR rises, causing this behavior. A
small amount of damage is caused during the cycling of a battery, permanently
raising its ESR, so that is why older batteries shut down sooner.

Basically, you can think of it as a 5L bucket of water with a hole in the
bottom. The first liter will have a much higher pressure than the last.
Running energy intensive features (GPS, 3D, camera, cell modem, etc) increases
the minimum needed pressure, causing the device to shutdown when lower power
features would operate just fine. As you keep using the bucket, the mound of
dirt its on gets washed away, reducing the maximum pressure you can get out of
it.

Building a good battery gauge is non-trivial as you have to factor in how much
people use high energy features when the battery is nearing end of charge.
Better low power modes would help with this, but nobody has found a good way
of indicating to the user the battery has X% power left at current use vs the
battery has Y% of its fully charged capacity remaining.

~~~
nradov
It would be nice if smartphones would degrade more gracefully. The instant
that the protection circuit detects that the battery is no longer unable to
supply enough power I would think it could immediately shut down all extra
peripherals and go into ultra power saving mode (grayscale screen, no sensors,
no apps, only phone calls and SMS).

~~~
extrapickles
The ultra low power mode might not be able to do SMS or phone calls over
cellular as it needs large bursts of power to TX, depending on connection
quality and type (2g vs LTE, range to tower, etc).

A capacitor that can store enough charge to send/receive a SMS would allow
this to work as the capacitor can be charged slowly, but it would take up
valuable room inside the phone (a few mm^3). Some embedded cell/sat radios
where size isn't very important already do this to reduce demands on the hosts
electrical system (eg: solar powered parking meters that take credit cards).

~~~
nradov
The ultra power saving mode on Samsung phones does SMS and phone calls over
cellular. That is an existing product feature, the problem is just that it
doesn't automatically switch to that mode when the battery still has some
charge but isn't capable of putting out enough power to sustain normal
operations.

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acconrad
This isn't just on Pixels, I have a 6P that will turn off early as well, and
I'd hazard a guess it has more to do with the latest Android versions than the
specific hardware.

~~~
anthony_romeo
My Galaxy Note 4 did the same thing. But this was after about a year of use.
And hey, after replacing the battery it works fine again!

And as an aside, I dropped my Note 4 recently and broke the glass. I was
thinking about the possibility of getting a new phone. But after looking at
this season's options I'm heavily leaning toward just replacing the glass. One
reason is that no top-of-the-line smartphone seems to have a replaceable
battery to avoid these problems.

More generally, this season's phones are also _cheap-looking_ and _cheap-
feeling_. The Pixel feels like a $200 phone at best, with its cheap aluminum
shell, fragile-feeling uncomfortable buttons, and ugly plastic/glass/whatever
square on the back. I've been losing faith in Samsung's build quality (I've
had some issues with my Note 4 and my previous Samsung phone, and the news
about the exploding Note really turned me off the company). Even the latest
iphone looks uglier than usual (that glossy bezel really doesn't do it for me,
looks like a free phone you get when you sign up for a phone plan).

2016 is a really really bad year for smartphones. None of these machines seem
like they're really worth their price. The next great phone is probably going
to be one that doesn't feel like corners were cut.

~~~
afterburner
Yes, batteries definitely need replacing after a year or so, maybe 2 if the
original battery was very good quality. Don't go with the cheapest eBay
batteries either; Monoprice seems to be good if you buy directly from them.
I've had my phone for a long time, partly because of the bad phone options
with diminishing key features recently (SD card, removable battery). I've
replaced the battery every year, and I can get down to 1% battery. When it
runs down faster and can't make it that low, it's time to replace the battery.

Now, why this happens in a brand new phone like the Pixel is another matter...

~~~
yabatopia
I routinely replace my smartphone battery after 1 year of use, occasionally a
few months later. The brand of smartphone doesn't matter: after one year of
daily recharging a battery has seen it's best days. The hardest part is
finding an original battery, especially on Amazon.

------
mmastrac
Is this a similar issue to the one that seems to be plaguing iPhones as well
[1]? Is this bad charge controllers or bad batteries?

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-statement-on-iphone-
shu...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-statement-on-iphone-shutdown-
issue-2016-12)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Or is everybody paranoid about batteries after the Samsung recall?

~~~
Tloewald
Perhaps battery controller software has been tweaked in some kind of more
conservative direction.

~~~
russdill
One of the failure modes for lithium ion is overdischarge. a Recovering a
battery that has been overdischarged is difficult and sometimes impossible.
This seems super over conservative though

[http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm](http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm)

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cft
When my Nexus 6 shuts down at 25%, I can turn it back on, and it still shows
23% after that. And it does seem to be temperature dependent. So I think it
has to do with battery monitoring.

~~~
digi_owl
Quite likely. My understanding is that battery capacity is measured based on
the voltage drops as the mah runs low. Thing is that temperature affects
resistance and thus observed voltage (digital thermometer work on this
principle, afaik). Could be that Google has set the cutoff a bit high, and
momentary chills result in a too early shutdown (possibly to avoid data loss
or some such).

~~~
azernik
More likely to avoid battery damage - undervoltage can cause permanent damage
to both cathode and anode (from another thread here -
[http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm](http://www.mpoweruk.com/lithium_failures.htm))

------
PaulHoule
Android on Google devices is a joke. I have a new Nexus 7 that sometimes turns
on and off correctly and sometimes does not. I see articles on how great the
power management is going to be on Android N+1 but I think the people who
write them run iOS because if they ran Android they'd be telling google to
make the power button work right first.

~~~
mustacheemperor
Honestly, it's starting to feel like Android on a lot of devices is a joke, as
far as the hardware experience. I've always been a passionate fan of the OS
and anti-walled garden, but the daily frustrations of using my S6, a year old
"flagship" phone, kind of makes me question what the advantages really are.

It's so frustrating to hold an $800+ device while my home screen slowly
populates with app icons, the back becoming scorching hot while the battery
life visibly ticks down from the load. How does this phone have such grotesque
memory management problems that running Maps and Spotify at the same time is
enough to grind it to a crawl? Battery life has gradually decreased over time
to the point that some days the phone is at 38% by lunchtime after primarily
sitting in my pocket all morning. At this point the single most advantageous
aspect of Android for me is the voice assistant - tasker seems nice, but I
can't charge my phone four times a day. Nova launcher is cool, but I'd much
rather be able to text my family without watching the keyboard lag out. Even
the voice assistant has random, arbitrary issues - for some reason, saying
"play ___ album on spotify" now only selects the album without playing it, or
shuffle plays it out of the search.

Makes it that much worse to see Cyanogen disintegrating. Somebody needs to
push for higher quality at the state of the art.

~~~
erikpukinskis
This makes Apple's choice to aggressively control background processes seem
prescient to me. Also aggressively pushing specific media codecs.

I have an Android (Moto E) now and have more or less alternated back and forth
between iPhone and Android (last phone was an iPhone 6). The things I miss
when in Android world are consistent battery life and camera quality.

~~~
RX14
I think comparing the camera on a phone cosing £70 to a phone costing £500+ is
a bit of a foregone conclusion.

------
koolba
Every iPhone that I've ever had exhibits this after 12-15 months. I think it
has to do with the number of charge cycles it's been put through.

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seltzered_
Had a similar issue on a galaxy s4 in cold weather (particularly when
launching the camera app). The battery was ~3+ years old though.

After doing several hours research into buying a new phone (iphones and
androids), I settled for now on upgrading the battery in my old phone to a
larger 5200 mAh battery. It introduces a slight bulge, but after the first few
weeks I've been extremely happy so far. The phone works 2 days under heavy
use, 3+ under light use, and changed how I perceive it - essentially I don't
think about charging during the day anymore, and don't worry about remembering
to charge at night / while catching up on news in bed.

My assumption is that this is a better solution because it's drawing current
from more cells in parallel, meaning less strain on the battery itself
(there's an equation for this, but basically more current on individual cells
drains a battery's capacity exponentially faster). It's also one less thing to
think about carrying compared to carrying a separate usb charger.

I'm hoping there's still going to be phones with removable batteries to enable
larger 3rd party ones to be installed, or that 'smart battery packs' on the
iphone or moto z someday allow for current sharing between the internal+addon
batteries.

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dorianm
Maybe it's the cold weather, as it's happening to iPhones as well

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dajohnson89
I was going to buy a Google Pixel C laptop, but there were reports of really
bad wifi performance. Looks like I have yet another reason to pass :/. If the
Phone is having basic problems like battery life, I don't have loads of
confidence in the laptop.

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mschuster91
My new Samsung Tab S2 does this too, it sometimes shuty down with 10%
remaining.

Seriously, looks like battery management isn't exactly the strength of today's
device manufacturers -.-

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raindev
It seems to me like most of the problems of modern tech are related to quality
yet everyone is rushing for new features and quantitative "improvements".

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boterock
I got a Moto E 2nd gen (2015) and I also have the same issue sometimes with
CM14 nightlies, so I would definitely consider it a software issue.

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darpa_escapee
My Galaxy S6 does this as well. Once it drops below 15% there is no telling
when it will decide to shutdown.

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geoffreyhale
And my iPhone shut down at 30% last night.

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st3fan
That is what my iPhone 6s Plus does too.

