Nexus 7 battery takes forever to charge

January 8, 2014 7:51 AM

I have an 8-GB Nexus 7 that's about a year and a half old. Its battery life seems fine, but the actual charging takes an unreasonable amount of time. When it was new, it charged in about 2.5 hours; last night it took 7 hours to go from 30% to 60%. I'm using the adapter and cable that came with it. Is there anything I can do to make my device charge faster?
posted by zeptoweasel to Technology (11 answers total)

Mine has never seemed to go very fast, to be honest, but that's a bit slower than I'd expect. My first thought is that you should check to see what's running in the background, I don't have mine with me atm so I forget where it is, but there's somewhere that it'll tell you which apps are using how much of the battery. If you've got something that's still trying to drain it while it's trying to charge, that would take it from ordinarily a bit sluggish to La Brea kind of bogged down.
posted by Sequence at 7:53 AM on January 8, 2014

Get a different adaptor and cable, and start testing the plugs in your house. One of the plugs in my kitchen where I charge all my devices regularly causes this same issue and I didn't realize it until I started charging stuff elsewhere and then it was fixed. Other times it's definitely been the cable. They go out with regular use, so get a spare and see what happens.
posted by These Birds of a Feather at 7:54 AM on January 8, 2014 [4 favorites]

Along with the other troubleshooting steps, try charging in airplane mode and see how much that speeds up the process. If it's not much, you may have a battery issue.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:07 AM on January 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

yeah, cables seem to wear out and for reasons I don't understand, still charge but not very effectively.
posted by skewed at 8:07 AM on January 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Try a new *(tablet, 2.1A) charger, definitely. But also, keep an eye on this. We're a four-Nexus household, and one of them developed a fault where first it became really slow to charge, and then it lost its ability to charge at all. Unfortunately, I didn't realise what was happening until it Stopped Charging and I spent the last 7% of its battery life desperately trying to back up my shit.
posted by MeghanC at 8:48 AM on January 8, 2014

I have problems with the socket in my Nexus 7, if I don't get the cable in just right it takes forever to recharge. In my case am suspecting that wear and tear has loosened something in there. Also check what is running in the background, you most likely have a lot more things on it now than when it was new.
posted by wwax at 8:48 AM on January 8, 2014 [2 favorites]

The dock for the Nexus 7 (currently about $25), charges the tablet through a set of pins on the side of the device, rather than the port that standard charger uses. Our Nexus lost the ability to charge through the standard port, but it still charges fine using the dock.
posted by basil at 9:13 AM on January 8, 2014

I had the same problem with my Galaxy Note 2. Got a sturdy new cable, used the same plug in and the problem is gone.

I then looked closer at the cable that came with it and sure enough there was a kink that I bent further and the thin plastic membrane cracked and out popped some frayed wires.
posted by waterandrock at 9:24 AM on January 8, 2014

That's a $3 fix - buy a new cable.
I find that after a while, the charging speed drops further and further, and a new cable is all that is needed. The charger and the device have always been fine, it's always been just the cable.

My guess is that as the cable is flexed over time, more and more of the copper fibers break and internal resistance increases.

I have noticed that cheap $3 cables wear out quicker than the high-quality cables that are included with the device (cheap cables have fewer strands in them), but I doubt you can tell whether a cable is high-quality (ie lots of copper strands) from its price - cables are a poster-child of companies putting a big mark-up on an average product to make it appear better than it is.
posted by anonymisc at 4:17 PM on January 8, 2014

Could be the cable or cable connection as others have suggested, or could even be something as simple as a case that makes the cable not quite connect properly. I had charging issues with my nexus 4 after shifting to a different case which slightly interfered with the charging port so it was cycling between connected and not connected very rapidly the whole time.
posted by lollusc at 4:21 PM on January 8, 2014

Response by poster: For the historians of the future - I put it on airplane mode and set the screen to turn off (not go to screensaver) while the tablet is charging. This brought the charging time down to about 4.5 hours to go from 20% to fully charged.

If it slows down more, I'll definitely look into getting a new cable and/or charger.
posted by zeptoweasel at 1:10 PM on January 27, 2014