I’m extremely pleased with how great the battery life is on the BraX3; I think it may even be better than the flip phone I had previously been using. I know that rechargeable battery technology has been rapidly evolving over recent years. What’s the current “best practice” to ensure that this phone continues to have a great battery for many years to come?
Do I use it up until the phone dies, and then charge to 100% before using again?
I’ve heard some batteries work best if you drain to only 20% and then charge only back up to 80%, does that rule apply for the ones in these phones?
The Settings / Battery menu has options for a “Battery Saver”, “Battery Manager”, and “Charging control”. I can’t find descriptions of what these do in the User Guide though maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. What should I be setting those to, if anything other than the defaults that came with it?
Yeah typically a lot of lithium batteries in mobile devices are best kept between 20%-30% and 80%. You can charge them to 100% when you need to for a big day occasionally, but don’t do it every night unnecessarily… and obviously never drain them completely flat if you can avoid it!
But that’s just the general guideline so someone more knowledgeable will have more detailed info, and may be able to speak more specifically on the battery design used in the BraX3.
Thank you. So just to play that back, in general I should use the “Charging Control” to limit charging to 80%, and plug it in to charge when it gets down to 20%? Does it matter if I plug it in frequently as long as it stays in that range, or should I wait for it to get all the way down to 20%, then charge it all the way to 80%, as much as I can? (And yeah, if I’m going to be gone for a weekend or whatever where I can’t charge and want to make sure it will last, turn off the Charging Control so that it gets up to 100% first.)
I’m also very curious what it means that the “Battery information” says that the “Maximum capacity” is 1000% of the “Design capacity”. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But that’s just curiosity; the battery seems to be working great.
If I may add that it’s good to occasionally (every couple of weeks) charge the battery until 100%. That’s for the software to accurately show your battery percentage remaining. If you only charge till 80%, the software will calibrate and consider 80% to be the new 100%. That wouldn’t mean that you will lose any battery storage. That just means that your indicator of your battery % will be off.
For some reason, iodeOS reads the battery capacity as 496 mAh instead of 4960 mAh.
Not sure why. We identified it in early testing and established it doesn’t actually affect battery performance. So it’s a minor impact bug that will get resolved some day.
As I understand it no. You can charge multiple times a day, as frequently as needed, just stay in the 20% to 80% range. And then just charge to 100% if you expect to have heavy use or be unable to charge for a while, or as @plamen says occasionally regardless so software correctly reports maximum battery capacity (one example routine might be weekly or fortnightly on a Sunday night/Monday morning you always charge it to 100% for the start of the week?)…
Most lithium batteries won’t mind lots of frequent short charging cycles if they stay in that range.
Also (just FYI - you can ignore this bit if desired) some lithium batteries can like constant regular trickle charging (so you use a lower power charger, so not a 20W-40W 2.2A-3A or more Fast Charger or such like, and leave them connected longer and more often to charge slowly) - which will help prolong the overall battery life span. Again just stay in that 20-80 range! But these are less common IIRC and you’d need to know for sure if it’s any benefit to the specific battery/device you have, to worry about it (for this you would use older or lower power standard 2.1A or possibly less chargers - that have lower Wattage for example - although they still need a certain level of output, as too low powered a charging can be damaging or unsafe -think fire from overheating-, or just may not work). I think it won’t hurt to do this ‘trickle charging’ with modern lithium batteries* if you temporarily have no other way to charge and are desperate, but if you aren’t sure if it’s appropriate don’t do it regularly or as your normal charging.
Note: * some older (i.e. early) lithium batteries didn’t like this back in the day and it lowered their performance over time. But also for a time some older or variant types needed this style charging. But I don’t believe it’s so relevant today.
As in my prior post this is just IME, as although I’ve had a fair bit of experience with them in mobile devices over the years I am not an expert or electrical engineer - so someone more knowledgeable may be better able to provide more definitive guidance and advice.
