Dialer and battery use

[djysrv1]

Normally, my HTC Thunderbolt with an extended battery gives me about 10-12 hours of talk and internet use and about 24 hours of standby time.  On Friday 9/14 I got just four hours of use.  In looking at battery use, I see the dialer went nuts chewing up 25% of the battery on a continuous basis. I had not made any calls since Thursday evening.

Force stopping the dialer and a cold reboot did not solve the problem.

However, after leaving the device turned off and on charge over night I see the dialer has throttled back to 2% of use or zero.  This is standby mode as I understand it.

A review of various Android forums on the Internet shows many reports of similar problems with Android phones.  A call to Verizon Technical Support revealed the carrier has no record of this type of problem!

There is no single cause of the dialer going berserk, but some reports suggest is it associated with the following sound settings being checked "on":

- Quiet ring on pickup

- Pocket mode

- Flip for speaker

All three settings are associated with the motion sensor.  My suspicion is that a bug in the motion sensor code keeps the dialer from shutting down after a call and after one or more of these functions are triggered by the user. 

The older version of the dialer had a setting that forced it to shut down after a call.  You could set it to return to the contacts screen on hang up.  That option is gone in Android 2.3.4, SW # 2.11.605.19 71ORD

It is not useful to turn off the motion sensor, though there are NON-root tools do so, since it is also used for screen orientation, e.g. landscape v. portrait, for other functions.

It seems to me that HTC and Verizon have some explaining to do because hundreds of reports on the Internet clearly means some of them must have been brought to the carrier's attention over time.

BTW: Verizon's technical support blamed the battery and sold me a new extended unit for $50 since the original was out of warranty.  That was before I did the research I am reporting here.