Something wrong with my S5 ?

[loco]

Hello all, been a while since posting. I recently upgraded my phone to a Galaxy S5 on Verizon. Since I brought the phone home on Sunday I have totally loved it. Seems to be amazingly fast and I'm very impressed with the camera.

However, I have noticed that the phone heats up pretty quickly. It seems like after surfing the web for a few minutes or scrolling thru Facebook the back of the phone gets pretty darn warm. Also I get this intermittent lag. I'll go to unlock the phone and it will literally take up to 5 seconds before it opens. I notice this on the keyboard as well. I'll start typing and the letters will pop up like I have hit the correct key, but they will stay popped up, almost like its stuck on a letter.

I took the phone to Verizon and the salesman looked it over and said he couldn't find a problem. He asked me to do a factory reset and give it a few days. I did the factory reset and all was perfect for about a day. Now, a day later, its starting again. The lagging is very intermittent.

Am I missing something ? Could an app be causing this ? I have all location services and sync services turned off except Facebook and Facebook messenger. I'm leaning towards taking it back for a replacement while I'm within my 14 day return period.

 

[leeshor]

When you did the factory reset I assume you allowed all the apps to install again. I suspect one or more of those apps are gumming up the works. Check out gSam Battery Monitor to see if you can determine what is sucking it down. How much battery time are you getting?

It is also possible that something is trying to sync and having a hard time. Or is syncing more often that may be needed.

 

[loco]

The battery drain was very dramatic. I literally watched it go from 100% to 45% in about 2 hours. This was before the factory reset. Today, I unplugged it from the charger at 6:30am and its now 12:25pm and I have 60%.

The salesman at Verizon suggested I remove an app called Meme Generator. I did this based on him telling me it was the problem. He said he was looking at the developer options to determine that this app was the culprit. So basically, I did the factory reset, removed the Meme Generator app and it look like the problem still persists, but fortunately not on the same scale or frequency.

I really love the phone. Its the perfect size for my old eyes and it does everything I need and then some. I would really hate to switch again.

 

[leeshor]

I'm still wondering what may be trying to sync and is failing, but trying over and over again.

 

[loco]

You could very well be right. I'm finding that this happens mostly at work. My office is in the basement, and I have no cellular signal, but do have fair Wi-Fi signal. Would it be safe to assume that whatever is trying to sync is having issues syncing over the wi-fi ? Will the gSam Battery Monitor give me a clue ?

 

[leeshor]

Absolutely. It's also possible that the router configuration is causing the phone to struggle in general. If it's not happening the same at home I think you have hit on the problem.

 

[FoxKat]

I agree with leeshor. Many problems with Wi-Fi are not the phone but the router. Often these problem are quickly resolved with either a firmware update for the router or in some cases a new router. Older firmware may have minor bugs that earlier devices were somewhat tolerant of, but newer devices may have been designed to no longer accept these tiny coding flaws and instead can wind up getting confused by communication errors due to flawed protocols. By updating your router's firmware (see the router's company website for firmware updates), you make the router more compatible with the newer devices and in some cases even to the point of being able to take advantage of faster protocols that weren't yet developed when the router was first manufactured.

 

[cr6]

I posted this on our S5 sister forum recently and thought it might be worth mentioning here.

So I've been a little perplexed lately because my battery life has dropped significantly over the past week or so and I haven't been able to figure out why. One of the most accurate ways of determining your true battery life is by your "screen on" time. Depending on how bright you normally keep your screen, you should average between 7-8 hours of screen on time on your S5.
Usually when I hit 25-30% battery life I'll plug my phone in, and I'm almost always at 7 1/2 hours.
Lately though I've had a hard time hitting 6 hours I didn't think too much about it until I noticed it was the norm after about a week. After looking at my battery details I finally figured it out.

As you can see in the screenshot, my WiFi shows that it's on constantly. This didn't make much sense because I rarely use WiFi.
If you open up your WiFi's advanced settings, there's an option called "always allow scanning".

This box was checked, which I soon found, puts a considerable amount of drain on your battery.
It allows Google's location services and other third party apps to continuously scan for a WiFi connection, even when your WiFi is turned off!
The point is, if you do use WiFi frequently, you should already have your main locations saved so there's really no reason this box should be checked. If you live in a big city and are always looking to connect to WiFi at new locations, it may come in handy, but imo, it's simply causing unnecessary battery drain for everyone else.
Try unchecking this box and watch your battery life improve dramatically.

Hope this helps.

S5 tap'n

 

[FoxKat]

I unchecked that option on mine thanks to you. However if you'll look at my chart you'll see the greatest consumption of power (the steepest downhill), was when the phone was 'awake'.

Since the phone was off and I'm my pocket during a part of that time (the second half of the chart between the two middle vertical gridlines and as indicated by the screen being off),

...I have to find out what is keeping the phone awake.

If you look at your chart you'll see that the 'awake' period is also the greatest consumption period of the entire chart and like mine it's the second half.

So WiFi isn't what is eating up the power, it's awake time.

 

[cr6]

Good point.

 

[FoxKat]

In fact, by the look of it, the first 7.39 hours or so, even with WIFI on, you only used almost exactly 10%. The second 7.39 hours is when you used another 62.5%, leaving you at about 27.5% after.

 

[cr6]

That was my original point, my WiFi was never on this whole time. That reading was from that box being checked and it constantly scanning. After unchecking that box, WiFi doesn't even show up for me because I rarely ever turn it on.

S5 tap'n

 

[FoxKat]

That was my original point, my WiFi was never on this whole time. That reading was from that box being checked and it constantly scanning. After unchecking that box, WiFi doesn't even show up for me because I rarely ever turn it on.

S5 tap'n

I hear you, but what I'm saying is that even with WIFI on for the first half of almost 15 hours you still only used 10% of the total battery power, so how much was WIFI really impacting your battery consumption? I say, very little. I'd love to see another 15 hours from full charge to nearly empty as above and with a similar usage pattern, but with WIFI Scanning off to see how it impacts the consumption when the phone is not "awake".

My point is, it's "awake" that eats up the batteries in all these phones. Every time I've ever had a battery issue, heating up, etc., if I looked at the chart above I would see "awake" on during the steepest parts of the power consumption. And just like yours above and mine as well, when "awake" is off, the battery consumption is like 1% - 2% per hour.

 

[FoxKat]

Here's my chart with the high power consumption periods highlighted in yellow, and the trend lines for those periods in yellow as well. In contrast, the low consumption periods are not highlighted, but do have the green trend lines. What you'll notice is the high consumption periods directly correspond to the times when the blue section in "awake" appears, and also to some extent when "screen on" appears. Again, in contrast, the low consumption periods show little or no activity in the same sections below.

In this one I took all the low consumption periods and re-leveled and compressed them into one section, then projected best, average and worst case scenarios to end (green trend lines), then tracing back to the numerical levels (white lines), and then showed where the actual levels fell (yellow line) based on the total consumption.

As you can see, had I not suffered all the high consumption rate periods, I would have likely had somewhere between 55% (worst case scenario), and 66% (best case scenario), of battery remaining at about 12 hours. Instead I had about 22% (actual), after only 11 hours. So clearly the high consumption periods of "awake" are the culpret here.

 

[leeshor]

Great graphics and explanation. There is a program called Wake Lock Detector that may help. You should take the results seriously but cautiously as there is a ton of information there that may not be relevant, but with some detective work you should be able to get an idea of where the issue lies.