7 years ago
7
Here's how you should be charging your phone, according to science
Yes, we know. Our smartphone batteries are bad because they barely last a day. But it's partially our fault because we've been charging them wrong this whole time.
Continue Reading
http://www.sciencealert.com
Join the Discussion
Interesting. For the past ten years I've been trying to fully discharge my phone batteries on a regular basis and then fully recharge it whenever possible. My phones have never had the problem of short life. So even though I've been doing it completely wrong according to this article it hasn't created any problems.
I'm confused.
Yeah, that's interesting indeed because I have been doing the exact same opposite. I literally stress when I get down to about 20%, so I try and charge my battery from about that amount every time. I very rarely end up with a dead phone that I cannot use, and always the extra precautions to keep my phone charged fully everytime I go out. I also for the past few months started carrying a little 4,000mah battery just incase I need to charge on the go. So far my battery has never had any issues, and generally lasts a full day.
Oddly enough, I've been pretty much doing as suggested for no reason in particular. And I've never had short life problems either.
I'm confused by this as well. The reason it is recommended to charge your phone in fewer long bursts is due to the fact that li-ion batteries have a finite amount of charge cycles before it won't hold a charge and decreases in longevity over time up to that point. One full charge is one charge cycle. A 10% charge is 0.1 of a charge cycle. If you constantly charge your phone back up when it hits the 90% point you will have more charges per day than if you had waited until the battery was down to about 20% and thus a 80% charge - 0.8 charge cycle. Depending on usage one could easily charge more than 8 times in a day at the 10% rate, which means they are using more charge cycles of their battery resulting in a shorter life.
I wonder if an app could be created to stop that trickle charge to 100% feature and change it to, something like, "Off until battery discharges to XX%"?
I don't think so; at least Android doesn't seem to expose the required functionality:
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/BatteryManager.html
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=30612
btw, this is something that (good) laptops allow you to configure; e.g. my Thinkpad is set to "only start charging when below 50%, and only charge up to 70%"
Thanks for the info.