[Desire Android Development] bemymonkey:
Hi Murdock,

You being sick of explaining something that's just plain wrong is no reason to ask people to stop talking about it ;)

It seems you've gotten some conflicting information, and you've twisted it around so that all the different bits of info fit congruently... unfortunately, that's not quite right.

Lithium ion batteries, when calibrated properly, will reach 0% on the battery gauge and shut down far before the voltage dips low enough to permanently damage the battery. In fact, a properly calibrated battery that tells the phone to shut down at 0% is likely to have a higher actual amount of residual voltage than a miscalibrated one that just turns off the phone at 10-15% because there's no juice left.

1. Who said anything about a memory effect? We're talking about a miscalibrated battery gauge here - in the case of people getting poor battery life because of it, it means that the phone thinks the battery has less charge left than is actually available, and is shutting down too early because of it. Check out the fourth paragraph here: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

This is the ONLY problem most people will encounter with regular use of batteries like those in our Desires.

2. No, our batteries do not take permanent damage when discharged below 10% on the imaginary percentage scale used in our Desires. The electronics in the battery pack/charging electronics will shut down the battery long before damaging levels are reached (this is likely what you see when a miscalibrated battery just dies at 10%).

Like I said before, the whole point of having a battery gauge is to tell you when your battery will run out - a device that turns off randomly somewhere between 0 and 20% is useless, and that is not a feature for prolonging battery longevity, as you seem to have interpreted. It's a simple miscalibration.

It's funny that you mention Battery University - I'm a big fan. You might want to read through some of the parts about deep discharge cycles again, as you seem to have either misinterpreted some of them. You should be aware that our Desires are NOT capable of deep-discharging a battery in normal usage. The Desire will shut off well before any permanently damaging low-voltage levels are reached...

Think of it this way:

Before your procedure:Phone runs 8 hours in active use, shuts down at ~1% battery left.

After your procedure: Phone spends 30 extra minutes at 100%, but shuts down 30 minutes earlier with 15% left.

Both scenarios have the same actual run time of 8 hours, and shut down at nearly the same voltage (the one before your "calibration" probably having a higher voltage) - but the first scenario allows you, the user, to know when you will run out of juice.

I implore you: PLEASE don't recommend this procedure for prolonging battery life. It may help when recalibrating an already miscalibrated battery, but for an already calibrated battery (if the user hasn't done weird ****e with his phone, it's highly unlikely that the battery will be miscalibrated enough to warrant something like this) it's likely to just cause the problems described above.

Yes, but only if the cause of the bad battery life is bad gauge calibration. And even then, the procedure Mad Murdock posted is likely to do more harm than good... I tried it out yesterday out of sheer curiosity - afterwards my phone stayed on 100% for about half an hour during active usage, and shut down at 9%. After wiping battery stats at 0% and a full charge, it should be back to normal.

All this process does is make the battery think it has more juice than it actually has.