Lumia 950xl Phone Stability

[djca]

My 950XL has been on the insider program and I always update to the latest build when they come out. Within the last three weeks or so, I've experienced frequent crashes, usually as I swipe the lock screen up. Had to restart the phone every time that happens and most of the time, the battery will feel very hot after the crash. Also felt the battery bulge a little big --- simple test is to try to spin it on a flat surface. Today I decided to bring it to a Microsoft Store and they replaced both phone and battery.

 

[MAK11]

As I posted above I've been using a new battery on my 950 XL for exactly 2 weeks now and didn't experience a single reboot/crash yet (new battery than come from a 950 XL that a friend at MS lend me for a month to test things up...so I have a third 950 XL which I'm not using yet for testing purposes to see if my own 950 XL is the culprit or not). So as of right now it seems that the phone itself isn't busted (new battery hasn't swollen at all yet even after intense usage) and only the initial battery took a hit (caused by god knows what..but given all the reports here it seems that the latest FW may be a cause of concern..). The Insider builds are not the cause though because my phone was never enrolled in the insider program.

 

[kristalsoldier]

Thanks for the description; I obviously don't have *that* problem.

Yeah, I'm the same on 14393.5, this last cycle was pretty bad, if I had a secondary phone (I may take our old M8 and make it a test phone for RS2) set up, I'd probably consider running Insider builds again, but otherwise I'm going back to the (relative) safety of Release Preview.

My latest deal with 14393.5 was sooo bad that I actually started looking for a used S7, on eBay, just about had it (battery, bluetooth, WiFi, and much more, such a downturn from Threshold 494...). Hopefully when they roll the official AU, it'll have more things fixed...

Yeah absolutely...Release Preview for me too!!

 

[anon(8966963)]

Looks like it's a few of us with this battery bulge and reset problem...

 

[PGrey]

Looks like it's a few of us with this battery bulge and reset problem...

Yeah, I wish there were numbers/trends, published somewhere. I kind of wonder if this is relatively isolated, or if it's more of an "eventual" issue, for most. I really hope it's the former.
It could be, like Krystianpants aluded to, a side-effect of bad charging due to OS issues, in Insider builds, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
The thing along these lines that really makes me go "hmmm..." sometimes, is that I'll put my phone on charge, and it'll go nowhere for a long time (maybe a few percent in an hour), but I disconnect it, and reconnect it, and boom, I go from say 86%->100%. Then I reboot, and I'm back to say 88%, and charging for awhile again, to get back to 100%.
This is concerning, which of the estimates above is correct, and in which cases is the estimate way-off, causing the OS to potentially over-charge the battery?

The battery is supposed to have heat-sensors and the like, but I'm betting there are ways for the OS/firmware to ignore these, within boundaries, and continue to charge, at least for some period, which would lead us full-circle.

I'm usually on at least Release Preview, I think we need to be active beta-testers, if possible, to move things forward, but I've never had cause to think this might incur physical device damage...

 

[anon(8966963)]

I'm on the regular production line and it still happen to me lol

 

[vonchowder]

My 950XL still having this lock-ups and reboots once battery level shows ~60% or lower. When its on charging pad, not many problems.
The disturbing thing is sometimes it will black out and go unresponsive and start buzzing until it gets rebooted, last night in the middle of the night it starting making a high pitched whine and the screen started off with lines and then it quickly started to saturate the screen with intense light until going all white at the brightest possible intensity. I immediately had to reset it thinking it would cause damage. I broke out my old 928 this morning as a backup.... doesnt really work on t-mobile all that well thanks to verizon . However, it is still snappy with latest insider build. No lock ups either.

 

[anon(8966963)]

Check you battery it's probably starting to swell up....

 

[vonchowder]

Just did. You're exactly right. The battery is slightly bulging. Will easily spin on a tabletop. I hope this is not a firmware issue that will kill a replacement battery as well.

 

[MAK11]

Yeah, I wish there were numbers/trends, published somewhere. I kind of wonder if this is relatively isolated, or if it's more of an "eventual" issue, for most. I really hope it's the former.
It could be, like Krystianpants aluded to, a side-effect of bad charging due to OS issues, in Insider builds, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
The thing along these lines that really makes me go "hmmm..." sometimes, is that I'll put my phone on charge, and it'll go nowhere for a long time (maybe a few percent in an hour), but I disconnect it, and reconnect it, and boom, I go from say 86%->100%. Then I reboot, and I'm back to say 88%, and charging for awhile again, to get back to 100%.
This is concerning, which of the estimates above is correct, and in which cases is the estimate way-off, causing the OS to potentially over-charge the battery?

The battery is supposed to have heat-sensors and the like, but I'm betting there are ways for the OS/firmware to ignore these, within boundaries, and continue to charge, at least for some period, which would lead us full-circle.

I'm usually on at least Release Preview, I think we need to be active beta-testers, if possible, to move things forward, but I've never had cause to think this might incur physical device damage...

As I said it has nothing to do with Insider builds because my 950 XL that had its battery swell up never had any insider build installed on it. I have 2 950 XL both running the same production builds and the latest Firmware (which may be the cause of the issue). One had it's battery swell up while the other didn't (the one that did has been used probably 10x more than the other BTW). I have a new battery in the 1st one now (from a 3rd 950 XL that a friend at MS lend me) for a month and everything seems to be fine (not a single crash) but my fear is that the FW or the Hardware may probably be the cause of the issue so I keep checking the size of the battery every day to see if it is changing.

BTW something importante to note: I installed the latest DTW FW via WDRT on the 950 XL that had its battery shot. While it was installed via OTA Windows Update on the 950 XL that didn't have its battery busted...

 

[PGrey]

Could be the firmware is "enabling" the overcharge though, by mis-reporting the battery data, anyway you slice it, something is pretty wrong here.

My phone completely nuked itself again last night, leaving me high-dry this AM. Second time I've had that happen, and now it's draining like crazy, on processes which aren't even set to run in the background.

To say this firmware/build combo is "unstable" is putting it pretty nicely, if you ask me. I think it "can be stable" and is for awhile, but when it's not, it's like a joke, trying to use the device is impractical when it gets to this point.

I never once had this happen, before the new firmware and the last couple of builds, before AU, really I think it was 14393.0.
I went to the new firmware almost in perfect timing with the new last builds, so it's not easy to pin it on just one thing.
I'm thinking of trying to flash back to the previous firmware now though, to see if I attain some sort of predictability, and general phone reliability.

 

[vonchowder]

I have tried to call Microsoft back about a ticket I opened with them earlier today and it is impossible to reach a human being in tech support for windows phone. I dare anyone to try to find an easy way to reach them via chat or a phone number that gets you to the right department. The only way I can talk to a human is to click on the Sales Chat. They cant even direct me to the right place. This is the first time I have had to deal with tech support for windows phone and I think it may have pushed me over the edge.

Edit, finally found a chat link after several obfuscated layers....

"Wait time: 30 minutes.

We are experiencing higher than normal wait times. Thanks for your patience. You're still in line for chat."

 

[MAK11]

Could be the firmware is "enabling" the overcharge though, by mis-reporting the battery data, anyway you slice it, something is pretty wrong here.

My phone completely nuked itself again last night, leaving me high-dry this AM. Second time I've had that happen, and now it's draining like crazy, on processes which aren't even set to run in the background.

To say this firmware/build combo is "unstable" is putting it pretty nicely, if you ask me. I think it "can be stable" and is for awhile, but when it's not, it's like a joke, trying to use the device is impractical when it gets to this point.

I never once had this happen, before the new firmware and the last couple of builds, before AU, really I think it was 14393.0.
I went to the new firmware almost in perfect timing with the new last builds, so it's not easy to pin it on just one thing.
I'm thinking of trying to flash back to the previous firmware now though, to see if I attain some sort of predictability, and general phone reliability.

How did you get the FW? did you manually update via WDRT or get it through the OTA update?

 

[MAK11]

I have tried to call Microsoft back about a ticket I opened with them earlier today and it is impossible to reach a human being in tech support for windows phone. I dare anyone to try to find an easy way to reach them via chat or a phone number that gets you to the right department. The only way I can talk to a human is to click on the Sales Chat. They cant even direct me to the right place. This is the first time I have had to deal with tech support for windows phone and I think it may have pushed me over the edge.

Edit, finally found a chat link after several obfuscated layers....

"Wait time: 30 minutes.


We are experiencing higher than normal wait times. Thanks for your patience. You're still in line for chat."

Don't waist your time. If you are in the US just head to a Microsoft store and they will replace your phone a battery straight away. If you are not then you are mostly screwed. There's officially no way to buy a new 950 XL battery and the only another option is to send it for repair where's there 80% chance that all they are going to do is send it back to you after flashing it with WDRT while telling you that's there's no problem. You'll have to write a big a$$ explanation letter asking them to specifically change your battery and send it with the phone or else they won't bother.

 

[PGrey]

How did you get the FW? did you manually update via WDRT or get it through the OTA update?

WDRT. Should be the same revision though, unless there's something really weird afoot?

 

[MAK11]

WDRT. Should be the same revision though, unless there's something really weird afoot?

Yup maybe something weird about updating through WDRT. Frankly it would be interesting to know if all of those reporting the same battery swelling issue (which if you check my post history, I was the first to notice a few weeks ago now) have installed the FW through WDRT or the "official" OTA. The is the only difference between my 950 XLs (besides the overall phone usage). The one I updated through WDRT got its battery shot while the other which got it OTA is fine.

 

[PGrey]

Yup maybe something weird about updating through WDRT. Frankly it would be interesting to know if all of those reporting the same battery swelling issue (which if you check my post history, I was the first to notice a few weeks ago now) have installed the FW through WDRT or the "official" OTA. The is the only difference between my 950 XLs (besides the overall phone usage). The one I updated through WDRT got its battery shot while the other which got it OTA is fine.

I really doubt they're different, I think it's just a chance thing. There's no easy way to check it, at this point, like do a checksum on the respective firmwares.
You have to just figure that the WDRT was pulling the released build, or things are really "off", and MS should send down another firmware update for all non-OTA updates.
If we can't trust the WDRT tool (remember this was WDRT, NOT Insider) then we're in a pretty bad place (okay, so maybe an even worse one).

My battery isn't swollen, it's just had these two "events", where a non-background process, the lock-screen, drained my battery to almost zero, and took awhile to recover afterwards (one I had to do a hard-reset to recover from).

There needs to be more attention to this, because it makes your phone completely unreliable, and nearly "worthless", if you never know if/when you can depend on it.

 

[anon(8966963)]

I'm on vacation in Italy so i really needed a new battery due to this problem and I couldn't wait for me to get back home because the dam thing just kept resetting... I found one on Amazon.it for 25 Euros original Microsoft and so far for the past 2 days it's working perfectly... When i get back I'll go by the MS store and have them give me a new phone... On the bright side now I have a spare battery lol

 

[PGrey]

I'm thinking about taking my phone to the store too. It discharges like crazy now, citing apps that aren't even background enabled, and I'm having a heck of a time tracking down what's doing it.
Plus, my Bluetooth is barely working, half the time if I disable it, I have to reboot the phone to re-enable it.

I wonder if they'd exchange mine, for the fast-drain issue, if I show them that it's apps that aren't even supposed to be draining the battery?

 

[Parham Mohammadi]

Hi, I have been having the same issue exactly the same way that you described, BUT my issues started a week after I installed my newly bought sd card. I wonder if that was the cause. Does your phone has an ad card in it? If so, is it "Sandisk extreme pro micro sdxc 64GB UHS-1 U3" ? I have put the swollen battery out to prevent damages to the phone.