On January 31, 2013 Samsung released Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean update for existing smartphone models including Galaxy S2.
After the upgrade, my phone has become a battery guzzler and overheats like New Delhi does in summers.
After the upgrade, my phone has become a battery guzzler and overheats like New Delhi does in summers.
I decided to investigate and discovered that maximum overheating (accompanied by battery drain) happens during voice calls. The phone becomes so hot that it becomes impossible to hold next to your ear.
Looks like the idiots at Samsung have mistakenly shipped an application called “Automation Tester” that runs in the same process as the Phone application.
As a result, as soon as you make or receive a call, this test application starts consuming 100% CPU and drains the entire battery within minutes.
As you can see (above), my phone battery dropped to 82% (from 100%) after just 5-10 minutes of voice calls.
Since I work in the software industry myself, it is hard for me to understand how can any company of global level be so careless that it can ship production software with such degree of carelessness.
If this were my company, I would fire the staff responsible for this extreme stupidity straightaway. Because by the time (and if at all) Samsung comes up with an update for fixing this issue, the phone batteries of millions of people would have been damaged irreversibly due to repeated drain and recharging.
In addition, the phone keeps getting hot throughout the day; the USB mount on Windows OS is broken and there are several other issues like extreme sluggishness and God knows what else.
Shame on Samsung!
Update (7 May 2013): Today Samsung issued a patch for the above issue. I applied the patch and observed that the overheating problem has disappeared. However the Wi-Fi is still broken (i.e. it keeps disconnecting every few seconds).
More Shame on Samsung!
