[Wildfire General] djpry:
"The battery indicator in the status/notification bar is a reflection of the batterystats.bin file in the data/system/ directory."

No, it does not.

This file is used to maintain, across reboots, low-level data about the kinds of operations the device and your apps are doing between battery changes. That is, it is solely used to compute the blame for battery usage shown in the "Battery Use" UI in settings.

That is, it has deeply significant things like "app X held a wake lock for 2 minutes" and "the screen was on at 60% brightness for 10 minutes."

It has no impact on the current battery level shown to you.

It has no impact on your battery life.

Deleting it is not going to do anything to make your more device more fantastic and wonderful... well, unless you have some deep hatred for seeing anything shown in the battery usage UI. And anyway, it is reset every time you unplug from power with a relatively full charge (thus why the battery usage UI data resets at that point), so this would be a much easier way to make it go away.

The whole idea of erasing that file having any effect on battery life is pure superstition and wishful thinking. The battery usage UI describes what your device has been doing that has been consuming battery; it doesn't change how the device is using the battery.

You want to "refresh" your battery stats? Charge your phone. When you unplug it again, the device knows it's at full charge (because the battery firmware says so), so the stats tracking treats that as a known milestone for reporting purposes.﻿"---Dianne Hackborn

"I can't remember enough about it to elaborate a lot on it, but HTC devices used to make kernel modifications as well as other changes that affected the devices charging. The original incredible was an example.

Essentially the kernel controls charging to an extent when the device is on, and HTC used to let the battery kind of discharge down to 90% and back to 100% more aggressively than other phones (i suppose so it wouldnt wear the battery out as quickly, since batteries choke themselves off once they fully charge as to not overcharge) That's where the whole bump charge thing got started because the phone would say charged when it would really be anywhere from 90% up﻿.

Different OEMs have used different approaches to battery charge management. Usually some combination of hardware "fuel gauge" on the PCB or in the battery, kernel driver, and sometimes a userspace daemon. The design of the specific phone may be friendly or unfriendly to charging.

For example, on the Nexus One, we could leave the charge circuit on (providing power to the phone) but disable charge flow into the battery (once it reached 100%), avoiding overcharging. The fuel gauge was integrated with the battery and provided 3s and 30s average current reporting, as well as voltage, temperature, and charge level, which was really nice.

On some designs there isn't a way to power the phone from the USB connector without charging the battery, which necessitates stopping charging when the battery reaches full and allowing it to discharge to a point before charging again -- how far you let it discharge impacts battery life and user perception of "is my phone charging all the way". Then debate ensues about how to report the charge level, if it's better to report the "true" level even though users will complain about their phone "not charging all the way", etc, etc.﻿"