Something made me realize yesterday that my Motorola RAZR V3c is much more than a simple cellular phone. I had a battery problem that I solved by rebooting the RAZR.

As I left for work yesterday morning, I disconnected my cell phone from the charger and made sure it was fully charged. The LCD screen read Charge complete, meaning I was good to go. I received very few calls during that day and didn’t use any other features of the phone. I had a total of 10 minutes of talking time, I checked my logs. Lo and behold, at 4 ‘o clock in the afternoon the battery was already half drained.

I decided to let the battery drain completely before putting it on the charger again. My phone is only a few months old and the battery lasted much much longer than this in the past few weeks. At 3 ‘o clock in the morning, I was woken up by the familiar sound the RAZR V3c does when it is low on battery. The battery drained much faster than I expected, and I started to wonder what had changed in the previous days.

I had been trying a few Java games on the V3c in the past few days. My theory is that either the Java machine on the phone or the games themselves would remain active in memory, draining battery power as their processes used more CPU.

To test my theory, I simply turned off my RAZR and turned it back on, effectively rebooting the cellular phone. I then put the phone back on the charger, and picked it up the following morning fully charged. At the end of the day, the phone still had its complete charge!

Cell Phone Tip: Do a reboot of your cell phone from time to time.

Cell phones are becoming much more like computers. They run an exploitation system and they can run software and virtual machines like Java. If your cell phone responds slowly or if your battery drains too fast, you could have a rogue process draining your phone’s CPU. Simply turn the phone off and turn it back on.

I used to never turn off my cell phone, keeping it charged as it needed it. I guess a weekly ‘reboot’ will not hurt! Have you had a similar experience? Share it!