One of our readers, Carl, sent in an interesting thing he found on his BlackBerry Curve 8530. He was experiencing a bad case of battery drain for the last few weeks on his 6 month old device and even when he switched to other batteries he was having the same issue. Once he realized it was not the battery he decided to see if it might be some runaway app causing the battery drain. He removed all of his recently added apps and that didn’t help. So he bought a new battery and still had the same issue.
This week he happened to use the stopwatch on his BlackBerry and noticed that it had been running forever. It was weird because it did not show up in his running applications in the app switcher. He did a little digging and found that the BlackBerry stopwatch application keeps going even when you reboot your device or perform a battery pull! The weirder part is that it disappears from the app switcher once you reboot but it keeps on running in the background.
I would not imagine that the stopwatch eats that much battery but I have not tested it out myself. Consider this finding another thing to consider when you are trying to diagnose battery drain…
PS: I am curious if anybody else spotted this “feature” before Carl? Any ideas why RIM would make the stopwatch survive both a hard and soft reset? Maybe they are using it to test how long it takes the device to reboot?
chestr ( View Profile) - Posts: