Your Smartphone’s Battery Gauge is Lying to You (and it’s not such a bad thing) | Hacker News Reader

Your Smartphone’s Battery Gauge is Lying to You (and it’s not such a bad thing)

phandroid.com

36 pointssoamv10 comments

People will only cease trying to get the maximum out of their batteries once we have wireless power and the phone starts charging itself as soon as you step into your home or office.

The technology has been demonstrated to work but it seems to be taking quite a long time to make it into consumer devices.

I don't think widespread use of "wireless" charging is likely at all. Better batteries are the obvious solution.

Indeed, and additionally designing to extract out the maximum perf-per-watt off the hardware.

If I can waste the charge of my new Android phone in a day or, alternatively, optimize my usage and phone configuration and get two days of batterly life, that means I'm still part of the power equation. If, instead, I have to choose between usage patterns that give 8 or 9 days of power, respectively, I will certainly not give a damn.

Battery life is a perfect example of "good enough". Would it hurt so much to equip the phones with larger batteries instead of, say, 1500mAh that seems typical now. As for the latest smartphones, it can certainly not be because of the physical size.

Contrary to this article, my Galaxy S (Captivate) stays at 100% for quite a while before dropping down rapidly. I wonder if they programed the phone to do that and "trick" the user into thinking it's fully charged when it is really not; or if it really is at 100% and they have a different battery system.

I wonder if its the same as they do to cars, I /seem/ to get far more millage out of the the first half of the tank...

That phone might be doing what I think is a much more obvious solution: Upscaling the actual measurement (clipping at 100% of course)

"Several partial discharges with frequent recharges are better for lithium-ion than one deep one. Recharging a partially charged lithium-ion does not cause harm because there is no memory.”

I just purchased an iPhone a few days ago and I feel like I received and read the complete opposite advice from somewhere bcan someone more knowledgeable than me set me straight?

You are referring to two different memories.

The "Memory effect" [0] is a problem with nickel-cadmium batteries that results in lost capacity when they have been partially discharged and recharged. You won't see that in modern cell phone batteries; as far as I know they all use lithium ion batteries.

On the other hand, the Apple batteries have circuitry that gives charge information. Supposedly, a complete charge cycle refines its estimates. I couldn't find a mention of this in the online iPhone user manual [1], so I'm not sure how true this is.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect

[1] http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iphone_user_guide.pdf

An execellent resource from Cadex, a company that provides battery testing and analysis equipment:

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_li...

TIL about bump charging. Neat hack if you're traveling to get an extra 5-15% battery life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com