So I bought a new Samsung S22 yesterday - and would you know my luck, I accidentally dropped it from about six inches onto a hard table, sans any protective case.
The battery now sometimes depletes really rapidly - like, 1% every two minutes - and I’m not sure if this is normal for a Samsung, or if the impact now causes the battery to go really fast. But is it the fault of the battery (which can be replaced,) or that something now causes the damaged phone to consume power really fast?
I have no idea; but when I suddenly had a rapidly depleting battery in my phone, it turned out that the cure (which I had to look up) was to take the battery out and put it back in again. No idea why that worked, but it did.
I think I turned the phone off first; so I suppose it’s also possible that turning it off and on was what worked.
I’m not speaking from experience, just WAG-ing, but is it possible that the rapid battery depletion is because the phone is so new, and because of that it has to perform some battery-intersive housekeeping (like downloading and installing updates)?
This is possible, depending on if/how the prior phone’s information was transferred. For example, if it’s downloading gigs of photos from cloud storage to the new phone or the like. I normally expect for any new phone to force it to ‘stay on’ while connected to wifi for a few hours and several reboots to get it up to spec between carrier updates, OS updates, app updates, and various cloud syncs.
BUT
If the battery is damaged, @Velocity wants to be extremely careful. There is a lot of stored energy involved and they should take appropriate precautions if they have indeed caused a failure. This isn’t judgement, it’s just precaution.
So a few things you can check.
We still have a metric ton of unknowns in this case, but this will help confirm / rule out @Thudlow_Boink’s valid concern. New phones, especially with large and detailed screens on high brightness also eat battery, but a percent every two minutes is really high. Granted, updates over cellular as opposed to wifi tend to be power intensive as you’re running all aspects of the phone at max, and 5g tends to be slightly more power hungry, but I have no idea if you’re updating on wifi or cellular (thus 3 above).
The OP did say that the phone ‘sometimes’ depletes really rapidly, and didn’t mention any substantial heat, which is . . . interesting, because I would expect it to be noticeably warm to the touch in the update scenario above (you don’t run at full bore and not expect some waste heat).
Sadly though, without a professional opening the case and looking, we can only do educated guesses about what’s going on. Yes, the battery could be damaged and failing, or something else on the phone could be shorting due to the drop, eating the battery. Just no way to know for sure.
BUT (again!)
Please, PLEASE, be careful with the phone. If it’s at risk of failing, I’d be very hesitant to leave it charging overnight unsupervised for fear of an energetic failure. And if you do so, please make sure it’s placed in an area where you’re minimizing or eliminating the chance of a fire.
The OP says the phone is only a day old. In that case, I’d return or exchange it as defective.
Definitly return, a six inch drop should do no damage, even without a protective case. I have had my S22 fall off the bed onto the floor several times with no damage.
Check Settings->Battery Usage to see if any anything is detected as the culprit. If it’s a sync with your old phone from the cloud it should show up here.
Otherwise I agree with @ParallelLines .
If you’re losing 1% a minute from a HW issue, it should still show up.
The S22 is known for having a pretty bad battery life (and also getting hot).
BTW, I had a Samsung Galaxy J7 that got wet and wasn’t waterproof. After giving it a while to dry out, I spent a conciderable amount of time backing up files from it, which involved booting the phone and copying files for less than 5 minutes before the phone displayed a large triangle with an exclamation mark in it, a warning that the battery was overheating, and shut down. I did this over and over. More than a year later I was curious to see if it finally had dried out enough and now it won’t even boot fully, just shows the warning and an additional image of a USB plug with a crossed circle over it before shutting down. All of this happened before I ever felt a trace of heat through the case, and I suspect it might be an overzealous false positive, but the point is the phone does have sensors that alert you when it thinks something is wrong with the battery.
Just be sure to take precautions about where you take precautions.
You can ruin a cord by dropping the phone and having the cord yanked out of the jack.
Did that yesterday. Phone got knocked off the table. I Get a message when I plug in the phone saying incompatible cord. It charges slowly takes like three hours.
I already ordered three usb c cords from Amazon. Cords are flimsy and its best to have spares.
I once dropped a phone and then had charging problems. Different cables made no difference. It turned out the USB jack in the phone itself had been damaged.
Buy magnetic cables.
https://www.amazon.com/magnetic-charging-cable/s?k=magnetic+charging+cable
I’ll get some. Thanks for the tip.
I got a new S22 back in August. First thing I noticed was rapid battery discharge, although certainly not 1% in two minutes, but sometimes as much as 20% in an hour.
I reduced my screen ‘timeout’ time from 5 minutes to 30 seconds, and that solved the issue. I can now generally go through an entire day (16+ hours), and still have 25-30% left.
Doubt if it’s the OP’s issue, but it is something you might look at.
Well, it happened again. Another accidental impact and the phone, which had been doing well, battery-wise, for a month suddenly is now losing 1% or 2% of battery per minute. I could get the battery replaced by a third-party vendor (since I’m abroad) but does that usually void the warranty?
The drop already voided the warranty in most cases, but yes, it’ll absolutely void it with any unibody cell phone. And it may or may not be the battery, the damage could be causing any number of issues including shorts.
Since you’re basically out of luck on the warrantee though, I’d absolutely consider a well reviewed third party repair option, because if is just a failing battery, it’s probably a cheaper fix than many, and could be a risk for a catastrophic failure of some sort that is more painful than replacing an expensive phone.
(see my earlier concerns upthread)