BlackBerry Curve 8320: Overheating, Battery Drain Continues

I was wrong, Google Maps for Mobile is off the hook.

The phone keeps overheating and draining battery once or twice a week. The pattern is still unclear - sometimes it seems to be related to installing new applications (over the network) or fiddling with existing network-aware applications (Google again), sometimes seems to be related to a race condition between cell and UMA networks.

Pisses me off, honestly.

The only guaranteed way to get out of it without guessing whether it snapped out of it or not for the next few hours is to give it a hard reset - i.e. take out the battery, plug it back in and wait forever until it boots.

I know I'm not alone -

Search for blackberry power drain
Search for blackberry overheating

Wonder how long it will take RIM to admit the problem (so far the official statement I got from tech support is "we've never heard of it") and fix it.

It is also interesting to note that iPhone suffers from the same problem (search for "iphone overheating").

There's one thing that makes me really nervous - it's one thing if it is just a runaway process beating its head against the wall and draining the battery, and completely different thing if it this process keeps transmitting on full power all this time from my pocket. Totally uncool.

BlackBerry Curve 8320: Mystery Overheating, Battery Drain

Suddenly found the phone quite hot, with the battery completely drained. At first I thought that I just kept the keyboard jammed in my pocket for a few hours - said to myself, no big deal, I'll just charge it overnight.

In the morning, the phone was still hot - I thought, no big deal, it's just been charging.

Then the battery charge started rapidly disappearing again. Cold reboot helped.

Trivial analysis would offer an educated guess - there was a runaway process consuming CPU and power. Too bad BlackBerry in production configuration doesn't offer any diagnostic tools...

So I just wrote it off as a weird bug.

Until the next time it happened, few days later.

Primary suspect: Google Maps for Mobile. Not everything is clear at this point, but it seems that the necessary conditions are:

• fetching driving directions;
• following the route;
  
• driving through a no reception zone (not sure).

Apparently, the My Location feature, dependent on cell tower triangulation, is implemented in a way that goes nuts once in a while and just drains the battery. I am also wondering what does it do to sustained radiation emission levels - can't imagine the hot device in my pocket not pinging stations like crazy on maximum power level when this bug is triggered.

Interestingly enough, a similar problem was reported for iPhone 3G (read this, search for "draws") - apparently, it is possible to drain the battery faster than the power adapter charges it.


Last time, it was possible to stop the drain by closing Google Maps - it took me a few tries, however, and I'm not sure how exactly did I get the BlackBerry out of that condition. Let's see if this happens again, and what would Google do to Maps to fix this.