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In order to get a full battery charge...

zenman

Android Enthusiast
Feb 3, 2010
268
81
Charge the phone until the led light turns green. Then unplug, turn the power OFF (Don't just put it to sleep, power the phone off completely) then plug it in (the led light should now be red) charge until the light turns green again, probably like 10 or 20 minutes. Makes a big difference! I learned this in another thread but I can't find it now. Thanks to the original poster!

Update 1: I did this method again this morning 10am. It's now almost 11pm and I still have a 60% charge! I made several short phone calls, checked email, texts throughout the day, and took about 35 pics. I also spent a fair amount of time looking at them. Granted I wasn't on the phone as much as the first few obsessive days of owning this baby but still, I'm very happy with this battery trick.

Update 2: I want to add this quote by 'jasonb1985' from a different thread:

"if you take it off of the charger right as the light turns from orange to green then you'll actually have a full charge. if you let it charge overnight then you'll wake to a phone that quickly falls into the mid 90's."

I have to agree with this. Even with my charging method above, if you let it stay on the charger too long after it turns green for the second time, the battery level will quickly drop after removing it from the charger. I've found it's better to remove it around the 20/30 minute mark even if the light is still red rather than let it sit there and miss when it turns green. Of course the best case scenario is to take it off the charger the moment it turns green but that's not very practical.

One more thing I've noticed is that if you spend a lot of time in a location where there is little or no reception such as a hotel or basement etc, your battery will drop very fast. Best to put it in airplane mode in those situations if possible.
 
Yea I came here looking for that thread. This really does work. I tried it this morning and after I unplugged I was at 100% for the first hour or so. After my phone died at the end of the day today, I charged and after it turned green I unplugged and used it for 8 minutes and was down to 91% - So now I am charging it again and going to let it sit over night on the charger....I wish the was a permanent solution, I can't always hover the charger and unplug and plug it several times to ensure a full charge...
 
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I am a moderate to heavy user with this phone. I am not into all the disabling of the phone features to make it work. I use Wifi, GPS, etc whenever I need it and otherwise turn it off....I try to use it normally without thinking I need to always change something to get extra juice. Besides having to top off the battery a few times, this has been the best way to get that extra juice. I hope they come up with a fix soon or someone makes a "Battery Top-off App."
 
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ok, this works for me if i leave it plugged in when i turn the phone off..(not unplug then replug in after it is off)

i don't think this is a bug in the OS i think that the phone uses energy while it is turned on and the charger does not provide enough power to both power the phone and charge the battery to a complete charge at the same time. if you found a smart charger that could provide more power than you might be able to charge the phone completely while it was turned on but you also might damage the charging circuit (i don't know enough about electronics to say for sure)

I'm using the battery indicator app. it tells you the battery voltage and temp and %.
at 100% my battery said 4.219V 81F then i turned off the phone. once the charging light turns green again i will turn it back on and add my new 100% voltage and temp to this post.

EDIT:
here is a link to a pdf that may be interesting to those who want to understand battery charging both for NiCd and Li-Ion
http://www.national.com/appinfo/power/files/f7.pdf
fully charged li-ion batters according to this article should be between 4.15 and 4.25 v
that means that my battery before turning it off was in the higher end of that range.
the article states that anything above 4.25V will reduce the lifetime of the battery overall.
so if my battery tells me that it is above 4.25 i will no longer be turning my phone off during charging.

EDIT2:
ok i have just turned my phone back on. i let the light sit green for about 2 minutes before turning it back on.
my new amounts are 100% 78.4F and 4.108V. it looks like this process actually reduces the amount of charge you have once you turn your phone back on. after less than 30 secounds of sitting here i see my voltage has gone up to 4.22. i dont think this small difference is anything that you would see helping you get a further amount of use out of your phone during the day.
and i think that the article i linked to earlier will back up my personal numbers here if you take the time to read through it.
 
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You better not be lying d00d :)

Will try on my next charge and post back on the results.

well im not lying, but i cant say for sure how good the app is at telling me stats on my battery...
thats the main thing im skeptical about.
although i do think that to get these readings it would have to pull the numbers from the firmware, so i wouldnt be too surprised if they were accurate.
 
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There is no need to unplug and replug it in several times. You also don't need to charge it on, though I can understand plenty of people will want to.

This is essentially the same as turning the phone off so that USB can charge it...the phone is eating some power while on, so when the battery starts getting near full, and begins to decrease the current, it eventually ends up sending all of the power to the phone instead, leaving the battery receiving 0 charge: which is the signal that the battery is fully charged. However, because the phone was actually taking a portion of that charge, the battery wasn't quite topped off.

This is why there won't be some software fix for this, or even a firmware update. It's been there on every phone, and Li-Ion powered device for awhile now...it's just getting to be more and more noticeable, as phones are able to use more of the power that should have gone to charging.

As for unplugging and replugging it in: It can take a moment for the phone to get a new reading on where the battery level is. It will assume that it actually needs to charge at first, and will try to while it figures out the batteries charge level. Sure, you are squeezing a little more in there, probably around the 1 percent mark...but you're also taking battery life off the top in the long run. Do that every day, and you'll be missing a nice chunk after a year. That 1 percent you are gaining, could be gone in far less.

Just charge it once with the phone off, and you are good to go.
 
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Worked for me.

Battery life has increased from 14 hours of heavy use up to 18 hours of heavy use with 30% battery left.

I find this hard to believe, since as it already has been set you would get around 1 or 2 more percent out of the phone by doing the above and killing the battery faster as the charges go on. An extra 4 hours under 'heavy' use would be around 25% more.
 
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well, yesterday i got less than 8 hours on a full charge (with very heavy use mind you, but this is supposed to be a better battery than the stock one...no?) without doing the turn-off thing (just charged it til it hit 100%, then unplugged and went on my way).

it would have gotten even less than 8 hours, but once i got down to 20% or so i turned my brightness all the way down so the damn thing would last me til i got home...
 
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