Samsung S4 Kitkat Upgrade Experience

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mochips

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Hi Forum members

I have upgraded my s4 via OTA from jellybean to Kitkat and been riddled with the following problems:

1. Battery life is really bad; post upgrade; battery now lasts half day only; this is with power saving mode activated and wi-fi switched off.
2. The device remains hot and is uncomfortable if placed in your pocket.

to fix I have done the following:

1. Deleted the cache entirely; no solution; Battery life still bad.
2. I then erased device to factory settings; then reloaded all apps from scratch and this solution has worked for me. Be careful with this fix you will loose all your sms's; even if you do a backup/restore with Samsung Kies 3.

Also, I now have a new non- battery related problem.

1.There is now a non- responsive blank black screen if you wake the device from sleep mode from the lock screen.
2. Facebook app hangs intermittently with normal use.

Does anyone have any fixes for the above?

It does not appear the I can downgrade back to jellybean.
 
mochips said:
...

It does not appear the I can downgrade back to jellybean.
Click to expand...

IIRC, this was one of their terms and conditions. Due to security reasons as I recall reading in their T's and C's before running the upgrade.
 
Did you not do a full wipe ? The issues you're referring to are quite often related to that...
 
mochips said:
Hi Forum members

I have upgraded my s4 via OTA from jellybean to Kitkat and been riddled with the following problems:

1. Battery life is really bad; post upgrade; battery now lasts half day only; this is with power saving mode activated and wi-fi switched off.
2. The device remains hot and is uncomfortable if placed in your pocket.

to fix I have done the following:

1. Deleted the cache entirely; no solution; Battery life still bad.
2. I then erased device to factory settings; then reloaded all apps from scratch and this solution has worked for me. Be careful with this fix you will loose all your sms's; even if you do a backup/restore with Samsung Kies 3.

Also, I now have a new non- battery related problem.

1.There is now a non- responsive blank black screen if you wake the device from sleep mode from the lock screen.
2. Facebook app hangs intermittently with normal use.

Does anyone have any fixes for the above?

It does not appear the I can downgrade back to jellybean.
Click to expand...

my post upgrade experience has been good, only thing that happened was my battery was draining quick but upon checking the battery stats i picked up that it was my antivirus which was chewing power. Simple solution i just uninstalled and replaced the antivirus with a different one and from there no battery problems no freezing no problems at all. I like the new white-only notification area and the other small tweaks introduced
 
mochips said:
1.There is now a non- responsive blank black screen if you wake the device from sleep mode from the lock screen.
Does anyone have any fixes for the above?

It does not appear the I can downgrade back to jellybean.
Click to expand...

Oh crap I have this exact same problem and its driving me nuts,first phone in many years that I have experienced any issues with and I'm a perosn that has been through hundreds of phones.
This wake up from sleep black screen/screen jamming issue has really affected me badly this weekend,let me know if you find a fix please.I'm regretting doing the update on my s4.:erm:
 
jem said:
Did you not do a full wipe ? The issues you're referring to are quite often related to that...
Click to expand...

I haven't done a wipe and don't have battery problems.I am however experiencing this problem he is having with the black screen,my s4 is from Vodacom so maybe its an issue with their firmware?

Edit:Also the phone seems much slower especially when waking from standby mode.
 
In my case I did have Skype installed and the battery ran down really fast.
I then removed Skype; problem still persisted.
Last resort for me was to do factory reset. I then had to install all apps from scratch; I am denitely not installing Skype. Battery problem is now gone.
 
I think I have a fix for the black lock screen non- responsive issue.
Dis - able the built in app called "Samsung Watchon" under

Settings> applications

Then re - boot device twice.

This has appeared to work for me.
 
I did the OTA install, not on VC though.
Battery life seems to be a bit better.
I get about 40 hours(15% batterly left) when I don't use the phone too much and about 24 hours on busier days.
I don't make a lot of calls.

GUI and Picture gallery was a bit jerky.
I pressed the home button yesterday and it asked if I wanted to use TouchWiz easy or just TouchWiz.

I tried both options and after a reboot I had no more issues with slow GUI or slow Picture gallery.
Not sure if I was just luck y or why it is now smoother.
I also run Skype with no issues.
 
Hi 40 hours; wow that is impressive; please advise what apps you have loaded and if your wifi and mobile data is switched on.
I cannot get more than 12 hours use with a full charge; with very little usage on my s4.
 
Thanks for the tip mochip, fortunately I managed to resolve my issues earlier after reading about the skype question I decided to update all my apps. There were around 20 that needed updating so I did all and all is well again no black screen and it's very responsive when unlocking.
 
On the battery drain issue, did you check battery stats? I've often found rouge apps chowing the battery. Killing them / force stopping / uninstalling resolved the issue.

Settings >> Battery >> Scroll a bit down to see what's using it.

I'm assuming it's the same on the S4, as the above is from 4.4.2 running on my S2 :P
 
mochips said:
Hi 40 hours; wow that is impressive; please advise what apps you have loaded and if your wifi and mobile data is switched on.
I cannot get more than 12 hours use with a full charge; with very little usage on my s4.
Click to expand...
This is a pic earlier tonight.

I'm mostly on my home network's Wi-Fi.
About 20 minutes on cell today and about 90 minutes on HSPDA.

Like I said don't make a lot of calls on my cell.
Mostly use Whatsapp for various groups, Lots of TapaTalk, some FB, Twitter, TeamViewer and Skype. The last 2 not regularly.
The brightness is turned way down, as I'm struggling with eye infections and sensitivity.
GPS is mostly off.

It is mostly over weekends when I'm getting 40 hours.
I rarely run the battery past 15%.
Not sure if it means anything. I read it somewhere and have done it since my S3 days out of habit.
Not sure how much battery life I would get out of the last 15%

S4.png
 
Last edited:
mochips said:
Hi Forum members

I have upgraded my s4 via OTA from jellybean to Kitkat and been riddled with the following problems:

1. Battery life is really bad; post upgrade; battery now lasts half day only; this is with power saving mode activated and wi-fi switched off.No Problems here, Actually battery lasts slightly longer. There was a faulty batch of battery's that Samsung swopped out.. Call them
2. The device remains hot and is uncomfortable if placed in your pocket. This use to happen with jellybean as well. I noticed it only occurs when a game is left open.

to fix I have done the following:

1. Deleted the cache entirely; no solution; Battery life still bad.
2. I then erased device to factory settings; then reloaded all apps from scratch and this solution has worked for me. Be careful with this fix you will loose all your sms's; even if you do a backup/restore with Samsung Kies 3.

Also, I now have a new non- battery related problem.

1.There is now a non- responsive blank black screen if you wake the device from sleep mode from the lock screen.
2. Facebook app hangs intermittently with normal use.Do you have the updated app? I don't have this problem.

Does anyone have any fixes for the above?

It does not appear the I can downgrade back to jellybean.You can...sammobile.com
Click to expand...


I have a I9500 S4 and used odin to update to kitkat.
 
The S4 cannot be downgraded back to Jellybean even with the ROM files from sammobile. Samsung introduced a new bootloader with the 4.3 update that kills downgrade and activates a e-fuse for "warranty" purposes, basically rooting and in some cases attempted downgrades trip the fuse and in download mode you will see warranty bit = 1 instead of 0. If Samsung uses the e-fuse to tell you if your warranty is void or not is up to them, I personally never accepted the 4.3 updated and instead enjoy a rooted phone with CM11 running. Trying to flash the ROM files from sammobile through Odin will fail.

Battery life could be due to a number of reasons and my chief culprit is Google Now. So my question is, do you use Google Now? If so try disabling it and see if it helps you. You will probably find that its location services, that are constantly keeping your phone awake and eating your battery. With 4.4.2 you now have a lovely new option through location services that can set what type of power mode you can use from high accuracy to power saving, try change to power saving and see if that helps.
 
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