Hot Droid

[LennyHO]

I wonder if anyone else has run into this problem.  I had my Droid mounted in the car dock today and was using it to give me directions to a specific location.  It was mounted for about 45 minutes and it was connected to an electrical outlet in the car so that it would continue to charge.  I always connect the phone to an electrical outlet when using it in the car.  When I arrived at my location, I dismounted the Droid from the dock and noticed that the Droid was very hot.  I do not mean warm.  It was hot, almost too hot to the touch.  This is the first time this has happened.  I have used the car dock many times and for a much longer period of time and the Droid has never heated up like this.  

As an aside, I have recently been having a problem where my battery seems to be running down even with the phone is switched off.  I usually charge the Droid every night before retiring.  After it completely charges (battery indicator shows completely charged) I turn it off by  holding down the power button and touching "Power off".  Recently whenever I boot the phone up in the morning it is no longer fully charged.  It is usually between 70% - 80% charged.  When the phone is turned off is it really off or does it go into some kind of standby mode?  This is weird.  I never had this problem until recently.  Do you think the battery is bad?  Maybe this is why it got hot in the car dock?  I have had the phone since the first weekend the Droid was available.  Four months seems like such a short time for a battery to run down. 

All comments would be appreciated.    

[logicman]

For the first issue see Cooking your phone.  For the second issue, I recall seeing some discussions of that in this forum. A search might turn something up.

[bkfist]

You might want to install "Spare Parts" from the market.  It will allow you to see if the phone is "going to sleep" as it should when the screen turns off, and will tell you what applications are taking the most CPU time on the system.  You might find an offending application that is in some sort of "loop" and draining your battery quickly.

As to battery seeming to discahrge while off, it obviously should not happen, but if you have a defective battery, and your phone is "sleeping" as it should be (typically Spare Parts will show about 20 to 30% "awake time" over several hours, assuming you are not using it the whole time...) both your hot phone AND the seeming "self discharge" could be due to a simple defective battery.

If you charge it to 100%, turn it off, pull the battery over night, put it back in and power up and it is still showing you down to 80%, there is a definite battery problem going on, possibly some sort of partial short inside the battery.  The battery is covered under the 1 year phone warranty, so you should be able to get it replaced under warranty.