n800 battery question

[grizwald]

I just recieved an n800 for fathers day... Love it so far...
Question I have is about battery conditioning. My laptop dies after 30 min. &I was told it was because I use it while it is pluged in. messes up the batery somehow. I was told the same thing about my cell phone. I should use it until it is completelydead and then charge it for a few hours an unplug it as soon as it is charged.
Will leaving my 800 pluged in too much negatively effect battery life? Are there any recomended best practices to get the most out of the battery?

thanks.

[convulted]

In short: there is a lot of misinformation about the Li-Ion and Li-Polymer batteries used in laptops and gadgets nowadays. In particular: (i) heat causes their lifetime to decrease (putting them on charge permanently heats the battery) and (ii) Li-* batteries prefer shallow charge cycles, not deep charge cycles.

More info at http://www.batteryuniversity.com/.

[travis]

The warranty packet says to not overcharge the battery -- unplug the charger when it says it is fully charged -- or battery lifetime could be decreased. And to keep the battery in a 15 C (59 F) to 25 C (77 F) temperature environment or both battery lifetime and capacity could be decreased.

Travis

[TA-t3]

Well, that info (about overcharging) from the Nokia leaflet is wrong, it's some old rubbish left over back from when Nokia used Ni-MH batteries. They still keep printing that for everything they make, for some reason.
There is circuitry in the N800 (and all li-ion battery devices) to stop charging when the battery is full, the reason being that the battery would explode if overcharged. That simply must not happen, so in addition to the N800 circuitry there's also a final overcharge protector inside the battery itself.
On the other hand, the battery lifetime _will_ be somewhate reduced if at 100% all the time (much more so in a hot environment, ref. the already mentioned laptops).
The battery capacity of the N800 is good enough to use it on battery for a day or several days even. But when you see the bars dropping feel free to charge it, that won't harm it. Just avoid discharging the battery all the way, because that _will_ in time reduce the lifetime/capacity. (But again, the N800 as well as the battery has discharge protection too, because discharge too much and the battery is destroyed. You don't want to trigger the built-in battery circuit though, as it takes special equipment to get the battery working afterwards. The N800 circuitry will step in first though.)

Use the (i) and (ii) in convulted's posting as good rules of thumb. :)

[grizwald]

Thanks for the info...
Worst case, I can always easily replace the battery if it dies.;)

[robmiller]

in the uk I found these, haven't tried yet. was thinking of as an option to some sort of AA battery charger set up for e.g. plane trips:

http://www.global-batteries.co.uk/product_info.php/cPath/192_194/products_id/1977?tduid=6115922e0d21e8b5d72f479ddb41c82f

presumably there will be similar priced "knock-offs" available in other markets.

rob.

[sojos]

I have been using my N800 daily for about a month now. One thing frustrated me the most is that the battery only lasts for about 8 hours after being fully charged, even without any usage and the N800 is in offline mode with softpoweroff. The scenario is: after engaging the offline and softpoweroff and leaving the N800 alone; 8 hours latter; when trying to wake it up from the sleep mode (supposely), either there is a low battery warning or the N800 just refuses to wake up due to extremely low battery.

I have the OS installed in the external MMC and have installed SCIM for foreign language input. I am not sure whether those actions cause the problem.

I have systematically removed those possible curlpit scripts from the /etc/init.d dirctory but so far without much success in resolving the problem. I saw others are getting days battery life and am wondering whether anyone can point me to a possible solution to fix this short battery life problem (before I go out and purchase a brand new battery.)

Thanks,

[sherifnix]

Funny thing happens to me. If I turn it off, it drains much quicker than standby mode.

If I leave it on and just lock the screen, it can go 3-4 days easy. With about 4 hours of usage, maybe 5. Of all the things wrong with the N800, I'd say its battery life is one of its strong points.