Recently I acquired a new Verizon phone. It was one of those chocolate ones that can play music, etc etc…. It was working very well, and I was enjoying using the camera and music to do what most proud papas do…. take pictures of Josh.
Well, all of a sudden, the battery would only hold a 6 hour charge. I had been running bluetooth and the “location always on” setting for a few weeks before, so I assumed that it wasn’t the problem. I assumed that my battery had received a memory imprint that wouldn’t let it charge fully even though it looked like it did.
Anyways, after a week of playing with it, I finally took it to the local Verizon store. After a full 1.5 hour wait for a 20 minute job (way to go part timers who wanted to talk to each other!), I got a new battery. Guess what? SAME PROBLEM!
I was ready to ask for a new phone. No, not ask. DEMAND a new phone! However, in the process of my ranting, I discovered the problem: it was the microSD card. I had taken some pictures of Josh and saved them to my microSD card. One of them was a quality photo (moreso than the rest of my photogenic progeny) and I set it to be my wallpaper (the default background of the phone). It turns out that when I took the card out overnight, the battery usage returned to normal. I don’t have a scientific paper to back up my findings, but I believe that if you use a picture as your wallpaper when it is stored on your microSD storage card, it will drain your battery faster.
That’s pretty poor coding, but I’m glad to have figured out the problem. I wonder if Verizon has a software firmware upgrade to fix it….