Jun 072012
 

So I’ve had a HTC Desire for a little while now. I’ve rooted it, flashed it many a time, installed ICS onto it, and it is still working well. However lately, the phone has been turning off before the battery indicator got even close to 0%

I tried to look around on Google for a solution, and got many different answers, but none seemed to work consistently for me. Until I tried running it flat, and then charging the phone while it was off. In the end, after a couple of charges with the phone drained and turned off, it has recalibrated itself and now tells me approximately the right percentage of battery left. It turns off around 1% battery rather than 18% now, so it’s a lot better than before.

This is exactly what I did to get the battery indicator back to normal

  1. Use the phone as per normal, until the phone turns itself off at 18%
  2. While the phone is powered off, charge it up until the light turns green
  3. After the light turns green, turn it back on and use it as you normally would
  4. Keep using the phone until it turns off again. For me, at this stage the battery indicator had already improved a bit, but was still off
  5. After the phone has turned off a second time, charge it back up until the light is green again
  6. Once the phone has been fully charged a second time, the battery indicator should be back to normal

After I followed those steps, my phone was back to normal. However after a few weeks of charging it when it was not empty, it had gone back to turning off at 18%-ish. So once I repeated the above procedure, it’s back to normal.
If it doesn’t fix it straight away, keep emptying it and charging the phone while it is off, and eventually it will be back to normal.

The reason why the HTC Desire has this problem is that the battery meter relies on a ‘Coulomb Meter’ to measure how much battery has been used by the phone. If you charge the phone before it’s empty, eventually the coulomb meter gets inaccurate, and needs to be recalibrated. This is more of an issue when the phone gets older and the battery doesn’t hold as much charge as when it’s new.

Hopefully this has helped someone out there with an annoying phone that turns off at 18% battery.

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