[Hero CDMA Accessories] d0ugie:
I have a few theories to account for these positive reports. First, it tends to be a while before people buy a spare battery during which time they put enough miles on their stock battery that it gets worn out a bit and during that time they build up some frustration. They may use it enough that it is not only weaker than when they had bought it but it is also weaker than the Mugen (or Seido or whatever) is out of the box. And just like someone buying some sort of fluid they saw advertised on TV by an excited Billy Mays who says when you mix it in with your car's gasoline it will give you 30% better mileage and they excited enough to pay a lot of money for it, no let's switch from that to that happy guy who whistles (Bob?) about his bedroom success with his wife when using his Viagra alternative with a money-back guarantee, when the consumer drops some coin for those pills and tries it and is in fact able to perform better with his wife, it's not anything in the non-FDA approved pill's chemistry (not approved for a reason) that's helping him, it's the placebo effect that comes with it, making him assume he'll have a successful roll in the hay, ... you get where I'm going with this, the placebo effect. It's the placebo effect.

I tested two new Mugen batteries under the same rules I used for every other battery I tested about ten times total, seven of which I published, all at a 250mA current. The redundant tests, as with every other battery, were very consistent with the rest for each particular battery so we know the equipment is solid. In addition to that, I ran the Mugen batteries, as requested by the so-called Mugen engineers, at lower currents including 150mA and 100mA, 100mA being about the current your phone uses when it's out of the box and just with the screen on, and those tests yielded slightly poorer results to the stronger 250mA current. They were not running hot at these currents so interrupting the tests for an hour a bunch of times to further simulate real-world drainage wouldn't make a difference. The 250mA current was low enough that when the battery had discharged to the 3.5V level, stopping the discharge, there was no bounce-back when I put it in the phone, always getting about zero to three percent. There really isn't much else I could do to mimic the battery being drained in the phone.

Think about it. If someone managed to cook up a battery that could fit in a phone like the stock without a different back cover, a battery of the same dimensions but with different chemistry that was somehow superior to whatever the HTC guys figured out, why the hell wouldn't HTC either buy that company or buy the rights to use their ideas? Everyone wants the phone they're about to sell to get tested with higher talk and standby times by the likes of CNET, so of course they're going to do everything they can to put the best battery in it.

I saw the same results I got with my equipment when I did software tests on the phone. I could have saved myself some cash and just have tested everything with one of these phone programs but because I couldn't get a phone to drain at a constant current (need to be standardized to every battery I test so fluctuating currents is no good) but if I'm going to post data that will influence consumers' decisions and end up, unintentionally, posting data that doesn't make certain companies look so good, I had to do this in the most bullet-proofly accurate way so I and some guys who are smarter than me put our heads together for months on formulating the best plan and this is what we came up with.

Imagination and fantasy (and battery companies) lie but I do not and I just don't know of any better way to produce accurate information on these batteries. I've invited suggestions from the beginning which was last year and what's on my site reflects all of them. I have zero to gain and much to lose by distorting the data or somehow rigging the tests to be favorable for some and not the others. Actually I had hoped going in that I'd find superior third party batteries, regardless of price, to the OEMs pound for pound and amp hour per dollar but that didn't happen -- with exception to some ebay cheapos and even OEM counterfeits that, though having less capacity than the OEMs of the same dimensions, were significantly, hugely, more cost effective than the Seidio and Mugen batteries. That said, those two companies, along with Cameron Sino, do sell oversized batteries (the ones requiring larger doors) that the OEM doesn't make (except for one for the Touch Pro2) that do squeeze out a longer charge, the only one that did that and did it at a better cost on the amp hour being a Cameron Sino for the N1. I was honestly dismayed by not being able to find a single company that didn't lie by over 10% than the OEM batteries.

I don't work for HTC, I don't get kickbacks from anyone, I don't take delight in making it harder for the little guys to feed their kids, the batteries weren't free (I either paid for them or they were mailed to me to borrow or just donated to me) by people like you. I'm in the hole a lot of money between the testing equipment, batteries, other equipment I bought before I used the CBA that was inadequate and a server with a ton of bandwidth I signed up for in the hopes of getting slashdotted and withstanding it (by the way, still haven't made slashdot but if any of you are bored and want to help, please submit a story on this to them, that server ain't cheap). Spent God knows how many hours on this. No ads on the site either. I'm only after the truth so that I can hand it out to people who are about to drop fifty bucks on something that will only deliver better performance in their imagination. My point in ranting about that (both the money and everything else I just wrote) is to underscore that I've got everything on the table for people to put their confidence in me and the people who've helped me and, finally, the data.

If someone's got any ideas for me to do this better, please /please/ advise. And if someone has a battery by someone other than the companies I already tested, I want to test it. I want to find someone who's being truthful, relatively speaking. Getting bored with the same old nonsense. What would really make my day is finding a battery of the same dimensions as the stock that actually performs slightly better, total milliamp hour-wise, regardless of its claimed rating. But that just hasn't happened yet and it won't I bet.

jbGuru, what Mugen wrote to me in response to their battery failing to get a better result at a lower current is known in some circles as total horse****, period.

Doug