My last update went through some troubleshooting steps I took to identify a disabled service that was causing my Android Samsung Galaxy S2 battery to rapidly drain since installing the Ice Cream Sandwich update. After making the changes described in the last post the battery seemed to last longer, but I was still experiencing poor charge hold times.
During my troubleshooting I also fired off an email to Samsung support which I did eventually receive a reply to, the response was surprisingly frank and honest. Essentially the reply stated that the battery my phone came with was not up to the challenge of running the latest update to Android (Ice cream sandwich AKA ICS). In the same email they also offered to post me a brand new battery that would be up to the job if I replied with my serial and IMEI details.

If you have a Samsung Galaxy S2 and you’re experiencing problems with the latest update then get in touch with Samsung here on their “My Samsung” support pages. I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed the battery being shipped with the S2 at the moment so the newer models hopefully won’t be afflicted in the same way. Certainly if you have an older model, and mine is from one of the first batches released, then you should definitely get in touch with Samsung support and hopefully you’ll get the same straight response that I did.

In the meantime, I discovered today that if you desperately need your phone to last at least the day then switch off the data network by holding the power button down until you are presented with a menu, from here select “Data network mode” and confirm that you want to disable it when asked.

The screenshot above illustrates how rapidly my battery dropped and then how the red line literally lasted hours until I was able to get it back on charge, pretty useful considering I needed the phone today.

Update: Read here for an update on how to fix the battery draining problem!

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So my Android Samsung Galaxy S2 got its Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) update last week. I will post a brief review of after this post but here I just want to talk about a fairly major discovery I made relating to a rather odd battery draining issue. I was finding my phone dying at least 7-8 hours earlier than before the update, which was basically half the normal battery life!
Looking at the battery usage screen I found “Android OS” was the biggest % user of my battery and had a keep-alive of 7 hours, 1 hour short of the time since charge.

After a fairly unsuccessful attempt to contact Samsung support I fell into a deep meditative state to consider the causes. After 48 hours of constant meditation (rounded up from about 2 minutes of thinking..) I remembered that a day after installing the ICS update I noticed that Google+ had been integrated as a service, I also noticed it had happily used 50mb of data when I don’t even use Google+! Obviously I decided to disable it, alas it did warn me that it may result in unexpected behaviour but I don’t think I could have predicted what it would do. That brings us up to the present time, I re-enabled the service and suddenly Android OS has stopped eating my battery and the phone is back to normal!

The lesson? Well the real lesson is Google are kinda stupid for forcing this on people and for furthermore making it impossible to disable but the other lesson is to be very careful when disabling services. I can only assume something internal to the OS was constantly making calls or references to the Google+ service on the assumption it was there but instead found itself constantly polling the service, causing the phone to not properly standby and to rapidly kill the battery.

Update;
Right, so the above helped my battery but it was still bombing out. After a quick chat with Samsung they were pretty frank. The battery my phone came with simply can’t handle ICS, the fix? Samsung posting me a brand new battery with a higher capacity 🙂
So, short answer – call support and they will hopefully be as quick and helpful as they were to me.

Update 2: Read here for an update on how to fix the battery draining problem!

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