....But I think in this situation, the actual experimental results are far more valuable than a million "expert" opinions or app/charger measurements.
I agree wholeheartedly. And we certainly can offer that advice for any question related to battery charging / discharge rates (best info is test on your specific setup). It is undisputably true. At the same time, I don't view it as a negative that people like myself and other responders have offered an opinion based on our own knowledge and our own experience that will still be of use to op if they decide not to do an experiment. And for that matter, even if they choose to do they own experiment, scientific method requires both hypothesis and experiment... it's tough to design useful experiments without hypothesis to capture what may be the relevant variables.
That part about
"expert" opinion really got my attention. Usually with quote in this fashion it's intended to emphasize the non-expert nature of opinion offered by someone who claims to be an expert. (it would be completely different if both words were quoted:
"expert opinion"). But there are no links to articles in this thread. To whom is it directed... all previous posters? I'm just asking,.... I hope I'm misunderstanding and you can explain what you meant.
You and I agree on the part that most phones these days don't have charging sensor. I've used
Battery Monitor Widget for a long time. The dev (3c) has got a website with a forum that has a lot of details hidden among hundreds of posts in his forum, but they're not easy to find and I haven't been looking there in years. One thing he makes clear is that
some devices have a battery charging current sensor and others don't. He has a list of these devices somewhere but I can't find it... none of my phones have ever had it and my impression is it's rare. What
is obvious from the graphs provided to me by the BMW app is that the current and %/hr reported by the app are associated with the
net battery increase rate (charging minus usage). This is based on the following:
- The plotted milliamp curve changes from single negative curve during duscharge to a single positive graph during charging (with no breakdown) so it seems very logical that the curve must include both charging and usage effects during charging (it's net).
- I have observed the indicated "charging current" gets lower as you use more juice during charging.
- The dev's definition of reported milliamps is basically change in battery stored energy vs time. That is a net charging rate.
The data recorded by the app are battery level, battery voltage and battery temperature. So it uses these data to make an estimate. The battery level is most directly relevant (for net change rate) but is only updated in 1% increments. So the battery voltage and temperature are input to a funky model that helps fills in the gaps in between.
Certainly other apps may work differently.
GSAM monitors a variety of other parameters which helps it attribute your battery usage to various categories and apps. But even gsam doesn't provide anything other than a "net" %/hr during charging. If gsam goes to all that trouble of characterizing usage but still doesn't split out the components of net during charging, I doubt other apps (that don't even report usage statistics) would be able to do it.
Unless the cable has a flaky connection or is get smoking hot, I'd be a bit surprised if the USB cable would make any difference in charging times.
This thread showed that cables can make a pretty big difference. There are a lot of variables that CAN affect charging rate and cable is one (but whether cable is important also depends on charger and phone). And I'm willing to bet that the 36" cable at the link which caused the lowest charge rate ran no hotter than the 12" cable with the highest charge rate (same wire gage). I think you'd agree "smoking hot" is not a very reliable indicator to look at for indication of total cable resistance, unless we had already considered the cable length (which was not previously discussed).
These are just my thoughts. I am not claiming to be an expert.
