This exact thing happened to me. I wanted to make sure that I could take lots of pictures and even a few videos. I had 100% charge to start which went almost to zero faster than had ever happened.
I talked with a man who said that his phone did the same thing and would not even accept the portable charger he had brought. How can this happen? If I ever go to another such event, I will take an old fashioned digital camera.
Is 40 degrees cold enough to have effected the charge? The wind made it feel much colder on skin, but not on a phone in a pocket.
BREAKING: Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty will NOT be objecting to the certification to the election of Joe Biden.
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I know how that could happen (I’m an EE):
You can vary the frequency at the towers quickly and at regular intervals to force the phone to relock on the signal. It forces the phone to transmit continuously.
Phones are just radios. The ratio between transmitting and remaining passive and receiving is called ‘duty cycle’.
Normally, once your phone locks on to a tower its passive until it has a reason not to be. Duty cycle could be as low as 5%.
You can force the phone to keep relocking with the tower such that the duty cycle approaches 100%.
I don’t think it had anything to do with the cold.