Cell Phone Battery Best Practice?

[sdandroid]

So is it best to discharge first and the recharge or what, its been so long I cant remember?

[crazythunder]

the only practice i follow is to buy 2 backup batteries. sometimes at work, i can't get a plug, and i stream music all day from shoutcast to my 2.1 speakers. personally, my cell is on constantly, it's rarely even running on battery. at home it's usually parked in it's cradle. at work it's usually plugged in. but having used many kinds of powertools, most manuals say to do as you suggest. at the very least, it can't hurt. but in my opinion, having never done it like that, it's hard to tell just exactly how much impact it truly has on your battery iuf you don't discharge. do you mean just for the initial setup when it arrives? i'm sure you could google and find some tests that were done. maybe.

[tread]

with modern lithium ion batteries, there is no need to do the initial charge behavior...

discharging lithium ion batteries now is actually bad for the battery, for a lot of reasons and technological jargon i won't get into... just don't do it... best time to charge a lithium ion battery is when it gets to the 20 - 40% mark, never fully discharge it... this will actually hurt you battery life if you consistently do it, and a lot of people still practice this and complain that their battery is only lasting for 1 year...

take for example laptop users, they plug the darn thing all the time and thats why software had to be developed in order to stop charging the battery so often and reroute the power directly to the mainboard.... a laptop battery should last 2 years just like a cell phone battrey should last two years, but out of convenience sake most people have to cough up the extra 100+ dollars after 1 year for a new one...

best place for a spare battery? the fridge
worst place for a battery? your car dash on a hot day

so to sum it up simply:

don't completely discharge
don't let it get in a hot environment
don't charge it more than a nights worth
charging to 70% takes a whole lot faster than charging to a full 100%
charging it often is not bad, just don't leave it charge all the time
spare battery in the fridge
20-40%? plan to charge the battery

dan

[defaultuser]

lith-ion's don't suffer from memory loss, so you can charge at any point. good rule of thumb is to not let them die all the way.

[Jorsher]

Most modern lithium ion batteries have a fail-safe mechanism to prevent the battery from discharging more than 10%. I've seen people that have "jump started" their battery that completely discharged, but it's not something I recommend for obvious reasons.

[sdandroid]

Thanks for everyone reply, i have had my Dash for about 1.5 years and the battery ( even though shows fully charged) will last five minutes while talking on it. So I was just looking for ideas as to deal with the G1 battery.

[Driguez]

Thanks everybody for your input. sdandroid, the battery in my Dash lasted about 10 months, but it was due to HEAVY usage, had to get another one as a back up.

[Jorsher]

Tread gave some good advice. Heat lowers their life expectancy, as it does for about everything. It doesn't have the memory effect like older rechargeable batteries, but a complete discharge is rough on it.

[sdandroid]

Driguez, at this point with less than a month left, i am just using my old t809, and my BB8100, no need to get a new dash battery.

[short/y]

best place for a spare battery? the fridge
worst place for a battery? your car dash on a hot day

so to sum it up simply:

don't completely discharge
don't let it get in a hot environment
don't charge it more than a nights worth
charging to 70% takes a whole lot faster than charging to a full 100%
charging it often is not bad, just don't leave it charge all the time
spare battery in the fridge
20-40%? plan to charge the battery

dan

All excellent points and, from what I've read from knowledgeable sources (like this article over at Battery University), absolutely correct. See the previously references article for probably more than you'll evern want to know!