A strange cell phone story

I noticed that my cell phone was getting much worse battery life then normal lately. In the past, I have been able to go several days without recharging, but recently, my phone barely lasts a day before running out of juice. I couldn't figure out why this was happening. I wasn't using the phone more then normal, and the battery wasn't old enough to weaken so much. Maybe an environmental problem was the issue? That turned out to be it -- I finally tracked the problem down to something quite unexpected: my new cell phone carrying pouch!

I recently got a new pouch which uses a small magnet rather then velcro to hold the pouch shut, and it turned out that the magnet's proximity to the phone was causing the phone's backlight to randomly turn on for 5 or 10 seconds at a time (I could actually wave the magnet above the phone and the backlight would magically turn on!) Needless to say, this resulted in the decreased battery life.

I have removed the magnet from the cell phone case by prying it off with a pocketknife and replaced it with velcro, which looks kind of ugly, but will hopefully return my battery life to its old self. I suppose the lesson is that when you troubleshoot a problem, the solution might be something obvious, but unexpected and it pays to think creatively.