This link at Motorola.com says that the new Droid X Extended Battery (model BH6X) is rated at 1800 mAh (mille ampere hours), whereas this link at Verizonwireless.com says that it is 1930 mAh. WTF? Who are we supposed to believe? Added... The original battery is the BH5X, which Motorola says is 1500 mAh, but Verizon says is 1540 mAh. More inconsistency. Who are we to trust?
all batteries have both numbers: the bh5x says 1500/1540 and the bh6x says 1800/1930. one is like the average and the other is the peak or the one is the low and the other is the average. i assure you all the extended batteries have the same amount of energy and will all last longer than any stock battery. no need for a conspiracy theory...
I would probably think morotola's stats are more accurate as verizon's marketing guys probably bumped the specs up a bit to make the phone look a bit better against the competion. I personally wouldn't get too hung up on it. I'd suggest focusing more on the real-world battery life people are getting with the batteries. My real-world experience has been that I take my phone off the charger at 6am and put it back on at 10pm and I have yet to need to plug my phone in prior to the end of the day (I don't stream media so my usage may be different then many others). From most real-world reports the owners of the extended battery do report roughly 20% more battery life.
But both are giving a measurement in mAh (mille ampere hours). How can mAh represent both average and peak? How can one measurement mean two things? It can't. Miles per hour means one thing. Watts means one thing. Pounds per square inch means one thing. Mille ampere hours means one thing too. One of those statements is wrong. Motorola and Verizon cannot both be correct (although both can be wrong). I am focused on real-world battery life, which is why I want to replace the stock BH5X battery with something else. When traveling, I'm forced to be an electrical vampire, always searching for an outlet where I can grab a little bit of juice. But focusing on the real-world does not change the fact that a measurement of battery capacity expressed in mille ampere hours is supposed to mean something specific. Your experience with the same battery may be different than mine (because we use our phones differently), but equally rated batteries should produce the same measure of energy, regardless of how each of us uses it. When you get your electric bill, they don't say that you used ABOUT or APPROXIMATELY so many watt hours of energy. Your bill is specific about how much energy you've used. When you buy gas, the meter tells you to the 1/100th of a gallon how much you pumped into your car. I'm not hung up on a conspiracy theory. I'm just pissed that the numbers are inconsistent when they should be the same.
Perhaps you'd like to read up on what mAh means when referring to a battery? Ampere-hour - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ironically, I'd already read that very same Wikipedia article before I started this thread... An ampere-hour is not a unit of energy. In a battery system, for example, accurate calculation of the energy delivered requires integration of the power delivered (product of instantaneous voltage and instantaneous current) over the discharge interval. Generally the battery voltage varies during discharge; an average value may be used to approximate the integration of power. just not closely enough. I stand corrected. The above makes it even harder to determine whether buying the extended battery is worth it. I mean, another option is to buy one or even two of the BH5X plus a drop-in charger for less than the fifty bucks to buy a BH6X (and new door) from Verizon. If was confident that the BH6X would consistently hold up all day, I'd rather just have it than have to carry a charged spare and be down the couple of minutes required to do a battery pull and re-boot. Then again, if even the BH6X isn't going to go the distance, having 2 or 3 BH5X is probably more useful. Thanks for taking time to help me, and others who might read this thread.
I have the BH6X and have been immensely impressed with it. It adds virtually nothing to the size of the DX and provides me with far more battery life than my iPhone 3GS ever had - and I never had a problem making it through a day with the 3GS. I'm sure it's just some kind of perception thing - but it sure seems like it adds more than 25% to my battery life. I'm very happy with it. Plus, I've still got my BH5X still that I take along on trips so I have a spare. Obviously usage is a pretty personal thing so I can't promise it'll last for you - but I think it's well worth the small cost and I get great life from it.
I will second that motion. If they hadn't told me it was only about 20% bigger I would have sworn it was giving me at least 50% more usage out of it.
