Nexus 5 Battery Problem Will Be Fixed Soon
Google unveiled the LG Electronics manufactured Nexus 5 smartphone on 31 October 2013 and released it the same day for online purchase on Google Play. The Nexus 5 features almost the same hardware configuration as the LG G2 which is not surprising considering that both smartphones are manufactured by LG Electronics. The Nexus 5 comes with a Snapdragon 800 system on chip, a 4.95 inch Full High Definition (1080p) display and 2 GB of RAM. It was also the first device to be released with Android KitKat 4.4.2.
While it was received very well by consumers, the Nexus 5 has a problem: many Nexus 5 owners have complained on Internet and Google’s own forums that they are experiencing sudden battery drains when using camera apps. This is a widespread problem it seems. The problem is related to apps that use the smartphone’s camera (such as Skype); these apps do not close properly and continue to run a in the memory and use processing power. This leads to battery draining faster than usual and even the smartphone overheating. However, we have learned that Google is aware of the problem and it is planning an update to fix it.
One user wrote this in Google’s own support forum: “It started yesterday. Phone was hot and the battery drained from 80c/o to 20% in one hour in my pocket. There was no particular installation or update. It seems it came from nowhere“. A Google executive confirmed that the Nexus 5 (and similar devices running Android 4.4 KitKat and featuring a Qualcomm SoC) has a bug that makes it overheat and consume battery life faster. It seems that the bug is related to the Qualcomm System on Chip, specifically to the portion of the SoC that handles camera functions.
“We’ve had scattered reports of persistent high CPU usage of mm-qcamera-daemon since our last maintenance update, and based on those, found a number of bugs that were then fixed,” the Google executive said, promising that an update which fixes the problem is going to be released soon. He continued saying that “More recently, there’s been a significant increase in the frequency of reported problems. These may be related to a recent update to Skype, which seems to access the camera regularly from its background service in some way that triggers this bug (note, we don’t currently believe there’s a bug in Skype itself). Investigating this, we’ve identified a few additional fixes that we hope resolve this issue for good. However, since the high CPU usage is an intermittent problem, we’re continuing to test our fixes to verify the problems are gone“.
The Google executive also offered a temporary fix until Google will actually patch the software that controls the camera app; the temporary fix is that if your Nexus 5 overheats or if its battery drains fast due to the camera app, then you can fix it with a reboot. While inconvenient, it should work until Google releases the update. It is also important to keep in mind that not all apps that use the smartphone’s camera trigger the battery draining problem; Skype and Snapchat are two of the apps that are known to trigger the problem, but even these apps don’t always trigger the problem.
“Uninstalling Skype may substantially reduce the likelihood of this bug appearing, but I realize Skype is a very important application for many people. Other camera-using applications may trigger this bug as well, but that’s been relatively rare. Most applications also do not access the camera when not in the foreground, so they will only trigger issues when actively used,” sais the same executive. If you are one of the users affected by this problem, we advise you to either uninstall the Skype or Snapchat apps until the update with the fix is released, or keep using these apps but reboot your smartphone whenever you feel it is overheating or the battery drains faster than usual.
