Something seems terribly amis with the battery and the battery metre on my Tab. If I am playing Drag Racing for example (which I highly highly highly recommend) I virtually need to keep the Tab plugged as it barely lasts an hour. Even with just basic browsing I can barely do a few hours. The battery metre also seems off cause it will be showing almost full charge and then a few minutes later I get battery critical message. When it dies a minute later and I switch it back on it comes on and shows about a quarter charge which shows the metre was off when it showed empty.

Any ideas how to fix these issues? Presumably an upgrade to Gingerbread would help but that doesn't seem to be an option as I can't connect in Kies mode and not even sure the update is available where I live (probably not).

Do I need to reformat the device? If I do is there a way to back up the whole device to PC for free?

Is there a background process that could be eating the battery? If so how do I find out?

Any ideas much appreciated.