[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bigdaveash:
Hi All,

Firstly, I'm new here so please accept my apologies in advance if this is entirely the wrong place to open up this thread. Forgive me if I've gone into too much detail here, but thought it made sense to put as much info down - much of the following mayor may not therefore be relevant to the particular problem I'm having.

I have a Galaxy Note 3, which I've had for some 19 months now and it has generally been very good and reliable. I drive quite a lot, and my car is a VAG group car which uses rSAP to connect via Bluetooth - this too has been very stable and reliable.

About 3 months ago I noticed that my battery life had suddenly reduced dramatically, despite no change in use from my part (no new apps, not suddenly watching YouTube 24/7 etc.). I figured the battery had passed it's best, so went to the high street and purchased a new genuine Samsung battery, but this behaved exactly the same as the original battery.

I then noticed, occasionally, that while at home, my WiFi was dropping it's connection to my router, complaining that "Authentication Failed" (despite the WiFi password not having changed). Disabling the WiFi on the phone, and then re-enabling it seemed to fix this.

The following month, I had a notification from my provider that I'd used 80% of my data allowance, and a few days later another warning that I was at 90%. I get 10GB per month in my deal, and AFAIK, I've never in the past come anywhere close to using this up. A few days later, I tried to get online to google something, and landed on an EE page telling me I'd used up all my data for the month, which would reset the following day. I put this down to the WiFi Authentication problem mentioned above.

The following day, the phone told me that an android update was available. I applied this update, and thats when things started going really odd! The phone suddenly became very slow to respond. Sometimes turning the phone on would yield the lock screen with no wallpaper, other times I'd get the wallpaper and nothing else (no digits to unlock the phone for example). And I noticed that when in the car, the rSAP connection would drop off after 10 minutes or so - I put this down to the phone being unresponsive, and called EE.

EE recommended that I return the phone to factory defaults, which I did. After this, the phone is definitely more responsive, but now my rSAP connection drops out after around 2 minutes, and then re-connects. If I am actually on a call, the connection stays up for a little bit longer, but still drops out after 5-7 minutes. If I have the phone plugged into a charger in the car, it stays connected for a little bit longer, sometimes up to 15 minutes, but still regularly drops it's connection.

I noticed that this new o/s has a new feature for "Trusted devices", which I've added the car as, but this made no difference.

It is almost as if, this new version has included some sort of bluetooth power saving feature whereby if nothing much is happening (i.e. I'm not actively in a call), the conneciton drops out after a couple of minutes - unless I'm on external power, in which case it drops out after a bit longer. Prior to the update, it would stay connected, sometimes for hours at a time.

Has anyone else encountered this problem, and can you offer any suggestions as to what I might be able to do to investigate further (eg. are there any bluetooth logs I can inspect?) or better, fix the problem.

Your help is much appreciated