[Xperia Play Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] CZroe:
I was late for work because my phone died completely unexpectedly and took my alarm clock function with it.

This isn't the first time there has been an inexplicable battery-life nose-dive causing me to miss an alarm *and* making me unreachable by anyone I might be holding up while late (Grrrr....). I'm pretty sure it's caused by the microcell, even though it wasn't connected (most phone will not connect without toggling airplane mode).

You can see where I was watching some Youtube videos and ran it down to 5% before putting it on charge around 4:15PM yesterday afternoon. After getting it charged to over 50% capacity, it then began dropping rapidly when I disconnected it, which wasn't noticed before I left home for dinner and a movie at 4:45PM.

Thanks a lot, Google, for not giving me the MUCH DEMANDED numeric battery percentage indicator.

Anyway, it hovered around 50% for several hours. I left my brother's place at around 1:00AM this morning, even though I knew I needed to get up at 06:10AM at the latest for work. I turned on the alarm when I got home around 01:30AM and got the message that the alarm was set for 4 hours and 37 minutes from now, which was more sleep than I've been getting but I wasn't going to waste any more time getting to sleep (just switched from 3rd to 1st shift). The battery indicator still showed about 50% and, as is often the case, my chargers and cables were packed up in the car for work the next day.

It had just gone over 8.5 hours without a notable drop in battery life (still over 50%; an imperceptible drop on the graphical status bar indicator), so why would I expect it to be unable to last another 4.5 hours on standby?! Getting my stuff from the car and packing it up again in the morning or setting an alarm on a redundant device takes more time and I wasn't about to deprive myself of more sleep when the phone SHOULD have been able to do this.

Well, I've had this happen before, so I at least took the precaution of turning off WiFi and Bluetooth, both of which had been on the entire day previously. Not only has it happened before, but I exchanged the phone... twice AND bought a second OEM battery with Sony Ericsson EP900 charger.

Anyway, the phone was locked in standby, as confirmed 100% when I woke up at 05:15AM to use the restroom. Didn't matter though: The battery life still tanked like the most intense of gaming sessions while sharing HSPA+ data over WiFi with a torrenting notebook! There was nothing in the list of what consumed what percentage to account for the drop. Sure enough, I woke up at 06:37, which was almost 30 minutes late and already well past the time I needed to have left home. !$#@%$#!

This only seems to happen at home, where I have an AT&T microcell. It almost never gets on the useless microcell without toggling airplane mode, which is not unique to this phone (confirmed with iPhone 3GS and two iPhone 4 handsets). It'll just sit there saying "no signal" or sit there holding on to the weakest of 3G/HSPA+ signals while standing right next to the damned thing. Also, the microcell drops calls when sitting right next to it and can't seem to ever successfully hand-off to Edge or 3G towers without also dropping the call (instantly reconnects with a full-strength signal meaning that there was plenty of surrounding signal strength outdoors). On top of that, the other party will often suddenly be unable to hear you even though the signal is perfect and you can hear them fine. When that happens, it may drop in about a minute if the other party doesn't hangup sooner when you "stop answering."

I'm unplugging the thing right away regardless. Screw AT&T. Even if it's not the cause of this particular problem, I can't believe my brother paid for this useless thing that makes everything worse. I'd just like to know if anyone else has had this issue so that I can conclusively determine if the microcell is related or not before I wear out my two batteries.