[EVO 4G General] wfrandy:
First I have to say that I admire the op's tenacity, I have tried to explain the problem here on the various threads to the point that I have just about given up. It is like beating your head against the wall. Some here want to believe so bad that they cannot see the facts that are placed right in front of them. I will attempt to take one more stab at it though.

First, as I have said before, I too do not consider myself an expert, I have people for that. What I do though, is design, build, and test charging circuits. That includes circuits for lithium ion batteries.

The op's original post is good, but not real clear about how these batteries are supposed to be charged. When you put a depleted battery on the charger, the battery begins to charge in a constant current mode. It continues that way until the battery voltage reaches a level set by the engineer that designed the charging circuit, at which point it switches to a constant voltage cycle. It stays at a constant voltage cycle until the current the battery draws at that voltage drops to a level set by the engineer, at that point the charging circuit is shut off. This is the point that the sbc kernels become dangerous. In order to not damage the battery, the charging circuit must now stay off until the battery voltage has dropped to a level somewhere below 4.0 volts. At that point it can turn on and top the battery off again. The reason it has to do that is because lithium ion batteries cannot tolerate being held at a full charge over approximately 4 volts (most engineers agree that the actual value is about 4.05 volts, but it varies based on what type of lithium ion battery you are talking about). If the battery is held in a charged state above 4 volts for any length of time (think minutes, not hours or days) internal battery corrosion or ion plating can, and most likely will occur. Eventually this will result in catastrophic failure of the battery.

To answer the obvious question, I don't need to look at the sbc kernel code as I have seen the voltage/current charts you have posted on the many threads here and it is obvious from looking at those charts that the sbc kernel is holding the battery charged at a voltage above 4 volts. This is damaging the batteries according to all technical data available, that I know of, concerning lithium ion batteries.

Another question I often see come up is why older phones had full charge when you took them off of the charger and the new ones don't. The reason for that is that most of those older phones actually ran off of the charger when plugged in. once the battery was charged it was just sitting their doing nothing until the charger was unplugged, at which point the phone switched over to running off of the battery. New phones, on the other hand run off of the battery all the time, even while on the charger. So when the charger shuts off, the battery immediately starts being depleted by the phone. At this point even though it is still plugged in, the charger is doing nothing. When the voltage drops to a point below 4 volts the charger kicks in and charges the battery back up again.

The problem is not that the sbc kernel overcharges the battery. The problem is that it is holding it at a charged state for minutes or hours at a time. Lithium ion batteries cannot tolerate that for long without failing, sometimes catastrophically. How long? I have no idea, I have never went to the trouble of charging them incorrectly to find out. I have blown up and burned down a few testing the limits of a proper charge though, and it is amazing the amount of destructive potential these batteries have.

Like a lot of others here, I could care less what you do with your phones. But as someone knowledgeable on the subject, I too feel obligated to warn folks when they are doing something that could get them seriously injured.