Even the best power packed smartphone battery on the market, the Gtel X3, will not take you through a full day if you abuse it or wrongly charge your smartphone, while your colleagues may be fully enjoying theirs for mare than 3 days.
One big mistake that we all make is to wait for our cellphone to hit the bottom zero till it switches off, then while at home, we leave it charging from 0% to 100% over night before we attend to it.
Ofcourse, few years ago I personally recommended this as ideal against a common technical problem “battery memory effect?”
What is the battery Memory effect.
The memory effect suggested that you can always charge your smartphone from 20% to 80% because your battery would then memorize that charge and literally forget that it should charge the 0-20% and the 80%-100%, hence you would lose a total of 40% charge. This is in fact and true but only for older nickel based batteries.
Remember our Nokia hey days where we used to easily pull out those removable batteries of any smartphone, in case it runs out and replace it with another, on the go, Well most of those batteries are the older nickel-based (NiMH and NiCd) batteries, and phased out, yet nowadays we use the lithium-ion batteries most smartphones.
When possible, do not allow your new smartphone to go below 40%, a minimum of 20% should be the least acceptable at any point always try to keep it charged up above with reasonable top up and do not aim to reach over 80% as well, its not really worth it for your battery, to hit a complete charge or cycle every day as this reduces battery life.
Most smartphone manufacturers say their devices rate their batteries at 300-500 full charge cycles, Apple claims that its laptop batteries reach 80 percent of their original capacity after 1,000 charges.
By charging daily from 0-100% you waste your charge cycles as well, ofcourse batteries are not meant to stay forever, they are not diamonds, but if you properly charge your smartphone it will last for at least 3-5 years with full performance.
When should you charge to 100%?
Your battery is like your muscle, its very healthy to push your battery to the maximum once in a while so that it reaches its full potential, this is more like a moment of calibration where every cell gets fully charged. This in that case is a full cycle and you should only reach a full cycle once every month, remember a battery has full charge cycles limits.
IS charging overnight bad?
Well I guess the explanation above makes it very clear you are hitting your charge cycles daily. However there is more to overnight charging, make sure when you do this, the cellphone is not under you’re your pillow or completely pressed by anything including those complete covers.
Charging overnight forces your smartphone to create heat and this heat kills your smartphone gradually.
Is fast Charging Technology good for my smartphone?
Many Android phones have a feature that allows for fast charging. Samsung even calls its technology “ultra fast charging”. Motorola boasts about its Droid Turbo that promises an 8 hour charge in just 15 minutes! HTC’s Rapid Charger 2.0 charges devices such as the One M8, One E8 and Desire Eye 40 percent faster.
These phones have special code usually located in a chip known as the Power Management IC (PMIC) that communicates with the charger you are using and requests that it send power at a higher voltage.
Apple’s iPhone 6 doesn’t feature fast charging but its Qualcomm PMIC is smart enough to recognise when you use a higher-amp charger (like the one you get with the iPad), and that’s a good thing because fast charging will heat up that Li-ion battery and cause it increased wear and tear.
Mind your smartphone temperature.
Half the time people play games till their small processor packs up creating heat, or leave their smartphones close to stoves, dashboards or windows in house creating heat around the smartphone which then slowly kills the capacity to store currents in your battery. Never leave it a very cold place as well, the effect is the same.
How to Store your Battery.
Lets say maybe you have that extra smartphone that you are not using, at the moment, how safe is it the battery and how best should it be stored? This remonds of my last brande new car bettery, it was squeaky nice and and new battery which I had just replaced my old one. Unfortunately the car had a mechanical fault which was not worth the fix, I ditched it for a year because I had another one to use.
After 1 year I remembered my new battery when the one I was using had packed up as well, and I was shocked to learn that even the once sweet and powerful battery was now worse than the old one I was using, the moral is batteries die with time, they need exercise just like muscels.
An average smartphone battery looses charge of about 5%-10 every month, if it was at 10%, after two months it cant hold anything and this kills your battery, try and make sure that you leave a certanin amount of charge over a longer time even 50% and charge up after a long time of no usage.
Once a battery is charged , it can not act as a new one which can take years without charge, the process becomes manual and needs human monitoring.
Technomag