Pandawill Gpad G10 -- Battery Issues

[AndroidApple]

Anyone have a Gpad G10, specificially from Pandawill?

I've had mine for about a week, and I noticed that it seems to only charge to 90%. I've never seen my battery say 100% even after an 8 hour charge. And once I unplug it and turn on wifi it can quickly jump down to 70% and after mild usuage only gets worse. I probably can get about 4-5 hours on a full charge, which I guess isn't bad, but it bothers me that it's not getting the full charge.

Anyone else have this problem?

I feel as though the charger that is included with the Gpad is complete crap. Since the usb cord they sent me was also crap. I ordered a charger on ebay for the Kindle Generation 1. It uses the exact same charge 5V 2000mA, and the same pin size.

Only thing is, can these devices be charged with a 9V charger? I know there are several different versions of this tablet, different batches, etc. Some came with a 9V and some came with 5V.

So do you maybe think that this things not getting a good full charge because its' the wrong charger for the device? Also maybe if it was the wrong charger, it could mean that the battery wont last as long once it's "fully charged"...

A seperate problem I am noticing is all the useless crap that this firmware has on it. Since the firmware is ripped from a phone, it has phone apks, telephony apks, mms apks, etc, some of which are constantly running and seem to be drawing life from the battery. In "Battery Use" under "About Device" in settings, I discovered that "Cell Standby" was using 75% of my battery! I installed an airplane mode widget that allows me to use Wifi while airplane mode is on. Since then the "Cell Standby" battery percentage has dropped from 75% to 14%, which to me means that the cell radio is drawing less battery, which is good, however I am not sure if it has had any benefits for increased battery life.

I'm still learning the whole Android OS. But I wonder if any of you guys have information on any of the stuff I have mentioned.

I hope a custom firmware will be released soon that doesn't have all the unnecessary apks that this firmware seems to have. BTW, I have firmware #370. Thank you in advance to anyone that can help me, or give me ANY sort of information.

Other than this, I am generally satisfied with the G10, if the battery charged to 100% and stayed full longer, I'd be so happy. Market works, speakers work, touch screen is quite responsive for a resistive type screen, I'm hoping in the future we can modify these things to run a lot better.

 

[Matt262]

If you want to uninstall the phone specifics apks while retaining the general functionality of your tablet I would suggest rooting and getting Titanium Backup which allows you to uninstall those system apps...as for the battery, it doesn't sound like there's a problem with the battery itself, more like a software problem...AOSP (Android Open Source Project) ROM's only report 90% charged for some reason when fully charged, the manufacturer has to modify that for their ROM. I read about this on XDA in regards to AOSP ROM's that people cooked for various phones. AOSP basically means its stripped down Android as it's shipped from Google -- a wellknown example would be CM6 (which will still show 100% charged when it is, but, IE on my HTC Hero through Sprint, the charging LED will change from orange to green *meaning it's fully charged* at 90%, but again will show 100% when its done because CM6 has that fixed).

One thing you could try is to some reading and see if the Telechips Clockwork Recovery will work for the G10, and if so, root your tablet and flash that recovery, turn it off and let it charge long enough to where you KNOW without a doubt it has to be at 100%, and wipe your battery stats in Clockwork, run it till it dies and see if that solves it...my battery indicator on my M701-R was pretty funky until I did that and voila all is well now.

The recovery and instructions are posted by Asure and Venoumous on Slatedroid.

 

[LS650]

Anyone have a Gpad G10, specificially from Pandawill? I've had mine for about a week, and I noticed that it seems to only charge to 90%. I've never seen my battery say 100% even after an 8 hour charge. And once I unplug it and turn on wifi it can quickly jump down to 70% and after mild usuage only gets worse. I probably can get about 4-5 hours on a full charge, which I guess isn't bad, but it bothers me that it's not getting the full charge.

I have a G10, and my experiences are identical to yours. If you check out the forums on pandawill.com, you will see that what you describe is very typical. I don't think it is a problem with the battery, but with the monitoring software - it just isn't very accurate.

I also get 4 to 5 hours of usage from a full charge, and that is very typical. I don't think that's so bad, actually; I'm used to laptops only giving maybe two hours of usage on a charged battery, so four seems like a lot to me!

I agree that the included charger is not that good - I tripped over mine and bent the tip, breaking it. Instead of buying a new charger, however, I found that my G10 charges up just fine by plugging in a USB cable. I already had a USB charger (supplies 5V to a USB-style port, for charging USB devices) and just put my tablet on the charger when I go to sleep. It takes a few hours to charge, but when I'm awake in the morning the battery is back to a full charge (well, 90% according to the monitoring software).

 

[linuxpr]

The baterry in the Gpad 10 is a 5.7 volt so if you put a 5V charger it will never reach 5.7

 

[AnimaTechnica]

i juat had an exchange with pandawill tech support on this - my gpad arrived dead no boot - they told me i need to charge it for at least 5 hours, so i charged for 10 hours - it appears charger was not charging it - i checked out the charger it was 5V 2A - so i went and bought a charger, same specs and tried it - same problem - now tech support tells me the charger should be 7.5v - so i said are you saying you sent me the wrong charger? no comment from them

linuxpr where did u get the info on 5.7V? could this be a typo? or did panda just give me a run around?

The baterry in the Gpad 10 is a 5.7 volt so if you put a 5V charger it will never reach 5.7

 

[Loonix]

hmm, if these things do not have different internal power changers this is strange.
My HaiPad m701 (sometimes refered to as g10) uses a 9V 1500 mAh charger
a second similar Pad i recently had here to flash a new firmware had a 9V 2500 mAh charger.

 

[AnimaTechnica]

pandwaill finally replied - they gave me wrong info - they confirm it should be 5V 2A - and so conclusion was by battery was dead

 

[AndroidApple]

Linux, where did you hear these have 5.7V batteries? 5.7V is the most random number.

Anyways, I was able to get my Gpad to show 100%, but after unplugging it doesn't stay at 100% for very long. However, I do seem to have more battery life now. When I charge it, I charge it for 2 hours or so (says fully charged), unplug it for a few minutes, plug it back in again for about 30 minutes (says its at 90% and charging), and then unplug and use. The charging system on these generic tablets is very off. These things dont know when they are actually charged.