Phones
It’s been almost four years since my current phone model was released and I suspect the support for it is going to be severely limited soon. In the past, I’ve waited for the price to go down on a model before taking the plunge but it seems this isn’t really all that cost effective if I’m buying a new phone more often. This is probably truer now that the phones are getting even more expensive.
I’m going to wait for the next models to be released later this year and I guess I’ll be taking the plunge and investing in one with hopes it will last four years instead of three. But I will admit it’s really frustrating to find it’s costing so much more than it did in the past to keep connected.
Speaking of my phone, it started doing something that is kind of worrying the other day. I’d been playing music in the car with it and found the device was quite hot by the time I disconnected it. Normally playing music takes very little power and reduced the charge very little. This time it had been significantly depleted within a short time. Later on I noticed it was dropping the charge 10-20% within a few minutes. Fortunately this hasn’t happened again but this was the sort of activity I had on the previous phone before it died less than a year ago. (Fortunately Apple replaced the device at no charge.)
2 Comments
Valerie
My current phone is from 2013 or 2014. Its last security update was released in 2016, which worries me. But I figure I’ll get a new phone after this one gets digitally vandalized or dropped and broken.
Recently I had trouble with its battery life plummeting and it was heating up, but then I realized that I turned on Bluetooth at the time when that started. So I’ve taken to turning off Bluetooth except when I want to use it, and battery life is back to normal again. Whew! In the past I’ve also fixed battery life problems by getting a new $11 battery. Though if you have an iPhone I don’t know that you can get a battery for $11. Mine’s an ancient Android phone.
Anyway, I have *no* idea if any of that is what’s wrong with your phone, but to me figuring out the Bluetooth battery drain was a big “Aha!” moment, so I figured I’d share, just in case.
Purple Lorikeet
I do use bluetooth but I don’t think that’s the issue because it tends to use low amounts of power with this model. That said, if something is going wonky even that might go off. I haven’t had any further issues like this so I won’t worry too much for the moment. We do have other phones around the house should I need a temporary one down the road.