I was just wondering if anyone could tell me why stock roms never use battery icons with percentage. Is it because showing the individual percentages, rather than just four or five different fractions of battery, consumes more battery?
And I don't just mean Samsung roms, but all others as well.
Firstly, it drains battery a little more, looks ugly, isn't a accurate indication of how long the battery will last (battery drains faster (upper 50%) and slower when <50%). (noticed how batter icon on stock roms displays half when battery is 40%)?
Secondly, Battery level is measured by how much how much voltage the battery provides. So if a CPU intensive app kicks in, percentage will lower itself by i.e. 20% and go back up once the app is killed.
Thirdly, will concern user too much and don't know when to either charge the phone (depending on usage) and ones who doesn't have a knowledge of physics to understand that "(battery drains faster (upper 50%) and slower when <50%)"
Fourthly, isn't as user friendly has a regular icon
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Well, this is not an issue, but i discover yesterday.
My battery performs well, as good as in my Hermes. I need to charge every night, cause i have BT active all the time, and push mail over 3G.
Yesterday the battery was at 70% charge. I take out the battery, and after one minute, i put on again. Switch on the PDA and the battery says 72%.
I test again, with 40%, and same result. Take out the battery makes 2-3% higher charge.
This takes me to think the method Kaiser calculate the battery remainig is not so fine. Is true that is better that Hermes, but perhaps the battery temperature causes the driver to show incorrect values.
So think you have 2-3% more battery that the value it shows.
Anyone can verify this in his Kaiser and post the gained battery?
Cheers.
I think the reality is that trying to gauge battery life of a Li-Poly battery down a single percentage point is simply difficult. Their voltage drop is not very steep, so the voltage differential between 70% and 73% is not going to be very much. On top of that, it is very common for batteries to gain a little voltage if left without load for a bit. You can see it with a flashlight... run it down until it's essentially dead, then turn it off for a bit. When you turn it back on, it suddenly has some life left that didn't appear to be there before.
I test with 83%. Take out the battery makes 87%.
So most people should have heard about currentwidget by now, most people talk about it and use it to see what battery drain occurs during standby mode or airplane mode.
Now I'm sure most know this but incase you didn't, currentwidget helps to ensure your battery is fully charged as well. This is good for people that complain about their battery dropping quickly after a full charge.
You can use currentwidget to monitor your charge, when the battery says its 100% and led is green, currentwidget still shows power going to the battery in form of "ma". I noticed my battery said it was charged and eventho at 100%, currentwidget still showed "ma" is being delivered to the battery . After two hours only it showed 0ma, now I'm sure that means that eventho my phone said its charged, it wasn't fully charged until 0ma were displayed in currentwidget. Since I noticed that, I've been charging my battery "fully" and did notice my battery stayed much longer in the 90-100% aisle when being unplugged.
So if you feel ur battery drops too quickly from a full charge, use this widget to help monitor your charge.
yep, tnx for the tip, im useing clarus battery and its do the same - and i like the widigt so...
the current widget always shows some value of mA . how do we know when the battery is really full ?
Well with me after 1hour at 100%, it shows 0ma. That's when I know the battery is completely full and reached its maximum capacity.
I don't think waiting for the battery to get to the 0mA level is good for the battery performance. Usually the green LED comes on when the widget shows 50mA.
A high-charge concentration for a long time in a Li-Ion battery is bad for the battery. Thats why mobile phones have a little buffer to stop the entire capacity to be full, and try to lose the first part of the full charge as fast as possible.
Since i use some RC Helicopter with li-po/li-ion that both have the same way to produce energy, I have learned how to use this kind of battery and how to ensure a good battery life/durability.
There is no reason to worry about the battery if you follow those few recommendation (given by a battery producer):
-Your battery has to be charged with a current of 1C max (1C mean 1230mA for a 1230mAh capacity).
-Your battery voltage must not be over 4250mV. If you go over, you may damage the battery and risk random explosion/fire. In normal use, it's better to not go over 4200mV.
If you charge the battery with your phone, you will never be able to go over 4200mV because the charge stop automatically before.
-Your battery must not be under 3300mV. Same risk as above. In normal use, it is better to not go under 3450-3500mV to ensure a good battery durability (numbers of cycle charge/decharge). I think the phone show 0% at near of 3450mV, but never check this cause i never wait my phone to be as close to the death.
-Your battery has to be drain at a current of 10C max, i.e for desire HD , 12.30A (1230mAh x 10).
impossible to reach that current with your smartphone so no worries about burning your cpu with heavy bench.
Whatever you do respecting this will not be harmful for your battery.
Hey guys, I have a weird issue. Regardless what ROM I am on, my battery percentage will randomly drop like 10%
Randomly, I will be using it, I'll be at 70%, then it will just drop to 60%, normal use. Been happening a lot more recently.
Is this a sign of a battery going bad? I've had this phone roughly a year (Stock battery).
Thanks!
What does your battery life look like? A battery's performance WILL degrade over time, but if your battery life is still good enough for you, I don't see any harm in continuing to use it.
You could get an app like Battery Monitor Widget. It will keep track of usage and calculate the health of the battery. You can also try wiping battery stats (the app can do that too), it could just be the phone mis-reading the battery...
Hi !
I have a nook HD+ which has been behaving strangely. Its battery life has reduced lately. I initially had problems with 'media' and 'SDcard' draining it quickly. But I was able to check that by formatting my SD card and deleting two 0 kB files in my internal memory.
However, the battery life, since, has not improved much. Moreover, I have started to see a few spikes in the battery charge chart (like the one in the pictures attached with this post) without having plugged the Nook in.
I am on CM 11 snapshot M8. I have already tried calibrating my battery by charging it to 100% and then removing batterystats.bin system file through PlayStore's 'Battery calibration' app, but the issue still remains unresolved.
Has anyone else faced a similar issue with her or his Nook ?
You cannot calibrate batteries in Android. Those silly apps just delete batterystats.bin and that is an Android file responsible for the statistics seen in your third screenshot. It gets deleted automatically when you unplug the charger at an almost 100% charge level, and it has nothing to do with the reported battery level!
The battery percentage as shown by Android comes from the kernel, the power management unit (PMU) driver to be more specific. The PMU, which usually is a separate chip inside the device, is responsible for monitoring, charging, and discharging the battery, among other things. There are many different PMU models, so this is highly hardware-dependent, and there most likely are no apps out there that can directly talk to all the existing PMUs to do something that's actually meaningful (which deleting batterystats.bin is not).
The only thing you can do is once in a while discharge the battery until the device turns off, then recharge it in one go to full capacity. That way, the PMU hopefully "calibrates" its battery monitoring by itself and should report more accurate state of charge values again. Measuring a battery's state of charge is rather difficult and not an exact science. Those percentage values are only estimates. So, the spikes you see on the battery percentage chart are a result of the imperfect method that is used to calculate the current battery percentage. Maybe this gets worse with aging batteries, I don't know. There's nothing really you can do, other than the complete discharge/recharge cycle you've already tried. Maybe a future firmware will come with a better battery percentage calculation method - but as I said, this is totally independent from Android, it's a low-level hardware and kernel driver thing.
Thanks a lot. A very informative post indeed !
Full battery charge/discharge cycles seems like the only solution then.
How will it affect the battery and its capacity to retain the charge though ?
To prevent any misunderstanding: you should definitely not discharge your lithium-ion based batteries to 0% all the time. Li-ion batteries live longer if they are kept between 40% and 80% charge. At 80% you won't get the full capacity / runtime, of course, but the battery will be able to endure more charge/discharge cycles that way. As I said, discharging to 0% followed by recharing to 100% should only be done occasionally, if you feel that the reported battery percentage has become too inaccurate. It probably won't fix the "ghost recharging" seen on the Nook and other devices. What probably happens here is that the battery's voltage is factored into the state of charge calculation. Li-ion batteries are usually charged to 4.2V per cell, which is "100%", and discharged to some arbitrary voltage, e.g. 3.5V, which would be considered "0%". Inbetween, the voltage curve is not linear. That is, 50% would not necessarily correspond to 3.85V (=(4.2+3.5) / 2). Also, the voltage depends on the power draw to some extent. If the tablet draws a higher current from the battery, the voltage will sag. If you then put the tablet into standby, reducing the current to a very small value, the battery voltage will recover and increase again a bit. This is what might cause those spikes (although they shouldn't be that large).
This and more can be learned on Battery University. And here's a source for the batterystats.bin calibration myth.
Thanks a lot Tzul. You have been very helpful !!
I may have to replace my battery soon. If the battery life does not improve, I guess I will have to buy a replacement battery from a third party replacement battery seller.
I changed the battery for a new one with 3400mAh capacity and of course android gauge reporting it wrongly. How do I patch kernel manually to change default values from manufacturer's 2300 to 3rd party 3400mAh? Any ideas?
Well, to reply to myself - I found it.
The solution to 'fix the gauge' with extended battery is to not let it drain to 0% but instead to drain only to the low battery indicator! I used 10% remaining indicator mark (didn't tried with 15% as suggested @batteryuniversity or 5% when battery saving mode switches on), then the crucial point is to switch the phone off and let it recharge in powered off mode till 100%. Repeat the procedure 2-3 times and it should be good.
The charging circuitry needs to learn what the max and min are, so it can then stretch its range to fit the battery's new and much larger capacity.
As a result now I have 3400mAh that holds around 3d6h with more than 8h of screen time. Hope that helps to someone too.
can u please tell in simple english !