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Nokia Acknowledges Lumia 800 Battery Issues, Software Fix Coming Early 2012

Despite being a gorgeous phone with some great software onboard, the Nokia Lumia 800 has suffered from a bevy of negative comments and reviews due to a poor battery life, and a couple of other issues related to the battery.

Thankfully, a fix is on its way for the poor battery life and those other issues. Nokia Europe has issued a statement to acknowledge the problem and promise a software update to fix it. We’re told this update will hit European Lumia 800’s early next year:

We immediately started to investigate these reports and can now confirm that while the battery itself is fine, a software problem on certain variants is limiting the phone’s ability to access the full battery capacity

Thankfully the fault isn’t hardware related, so you won’t need to send the phone away to get that locked-away battery replaced. Nokia understands that some users may not want to wait that long for the software fix, and if that’s the case you can return your phone to them for a direct replacement.

When we recently reviewed the Nokia Lumia 800 we did unfortunately experience issues with the battery. No matter what we did, the phone would only last around 7-8 hours maximum. Another problem we’ve seen floating around on the forums also cropped up on our handset – when checking the battery status in settings, the phone would show around 50% remaining, though with an estimated lifespan of just 1 hour. We have a feeling this is a fault with the software incorrectly accessing the battery’s capacity though.

Finally, and most infuriatingly, once the Lumia 800 runs out of charge, it will not turn on again no matter how long you charge it or how long you press and hold the power button down. The only way we found to get the phone back on is to use a mains charger with a higher ampage – such as an iPad 2 adapter or a BlackBerry PlayBook charger. Again, this is a problem that should be fixed early next year, which we’re very thankful of.

Nokia says that only a select few handsets have the problem, and they have a little trick to help you find out if yours is one of the affected. Follow the procedure below to find out.

Anyone who wants to know if their phone is affected can run the battery status test from the diagnostics tool already installed on their phone. (The tool is designed for service use and only displays approximate values.) Dialling ##634# opens the diagnostics tool. By accepting the disclaimer and then selecting ‘Battery Status’ from the list of options, anyone will be able to see their available battery charge capacity.  If your full charge capacity reads less than 1000 mAh then your phone is affected with this specific issue and you may find it is necessary to charge your phone more frequently than normal

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