Dah Duh Da-duh Da-duh — Charge!


imageIt’s like Murphy’s law for mobile devices: Right at the least possible  convenient moment, your PDA/smartphone battery goes dead. There’s a lot of voodoo flying around the Internet about how to squeeze the most juice out of those lithium cells, but no hard data. Me, I do evidence-based. I want double-blind placebo-controlled experiments, darn it!

Groucho has posted the results of his own recharging regimen tests over on his Nokia N95 blog. I’ll let him tell you about it:

I have run some tests on three N95s all purchased at the same time and all with batteries of approx the same age and they have had approx the same usage. I have charged each of three in different ways-
A. Was charged only every night (approx 6 hours) and nothing during the day, for a week.
B. Was charged when it went flat.
C. Was charged at every opportunity, day and night.
After the week, at the next opportunity when the phones all had an end of charge fall together, they were all unplugged and left without any use at all.
A, lasted for 50.5 hours.
B, lasted for 22 hours.
C, lasted for 58 hours.

So it’s not double-blind or placebo-controlled, and it’s only three phones. But you know, the difference between B versus A or C is pretty huge. Running your battery totally dry time after time does not make that battery happy. And when your battery isn’t happy, you aren’t happy.

via Menneisyys’s blog on Smartphone and Pocket PC Mag.com

 

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PatrickJ
Nov 6, 2007

I noticed Menneisyys’ post as well. I have always felt kinda guilty about not letting my devices run down to near or at zero. Real glad to hear there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Also, it’s very good news – because as you say, it’s not very easy to run it down nicely at the end of each work / school etc. day. So if it’s on, say, 40% at the end of one day, you know you want to juice it back up to have any hope of getting through the next day ….


weiganla
Nov 6, 2007

Menneisyys has been preaching this for ages, and I have a feeling he’s thrilled to actually have some numbers. These lithium batteries don’t have memory so there is no logical reason to run it down before you recharge, but it’s amazing to see exactly how much battery life Groucho lost when he did. The other nice thing is that he got most of the recharging benefit just by charging every night, which is good news for those of us stuck away from our docks all day.


Timothy Chan
Nov 6, 2007

This sounds true. I have a hi cap 2,200 mAH Dell Axim battery that I discharged fully always and recharged….it’s gone down the tubes…it’s worse than my 1,100 mAH one now.

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