Odd and worrying battery failure....any ideas?

[Guest RavemasterX]

Hi all,

I've had an OMC for about 6 weeks now since I snapped it up for £100 at Argos. I unlocked it the day I got it and put Atomic V3 (IIRC) on and I've been very happy with it since.

My job quite sometimes involves sitting about not doing very much, so I use the phone for browsing the internet and emailing. To keep the battery topped up I carry the USB cable in my bag and plug it into one of the work PCs (these PCs don't have internet access, otherwise I would use them obviously!). Today was just such a day. Had the phone plugged in for about 7 hours, battery level remained constant at 98% (it never quite seems to be able to manage to complete the charge when the screen's on and I'm using the phone). The only thing I changed today was to reset the screen timeout from 1 minute to 10 minutes, as I was using the phone to put a few bets in on the football and wanted to keep track so I could adjust my trades if necessary.

Anyway, about 15 minutes before I finished, the PC came up with an error message saying that the USB device had malfunctioned. The phone wouldn't turn on and just repeatedly buzzed when I tried to turn it on. Now obviously this is what it does when it thinks it has a dead battery, but the battery was showing 98% full a few minutes previously.

When I got home I plugged it into this PC and managed to get it into Clockworkmod recovery- but only with the battery installed, it would not boot into the recovery just using USB power which all the other android phones I've had have managed fine. I thought the ROM might have corrupted so I reflashed it, and the flash failed!

I then removed the SIM and plugged it into the USB charger. This time I got it into receovery and successfully flashed the ROM. I also reset the battery stats. Now the phone has booted and begun to charge the battery....claiming that it's totally empty!

Anyone know how the battery could spontaneously empty itself in the space of a few minutes? Is it normal for the phone to fail to boot on USB power alone? I'm concerned that the internal power supply hardware might be failing. If anyone has had anything similar or knows anything to try, I'd be grateful for any suggestions.