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[Q] How Many Times Did You Calibrate Your Battery Before You Gained Full Potential

I am now on my 2nd full charge. Drained completely and full charge while off. I have the battery calibration app and i use it. Im about to take my phone off the charger and put it to work.
How many times did you calibrate your battery before you got the full potential of it. I see some people are getting as much as 30+ hrs on their device while im getting 7-9 on moderate use.

I've never done that. Always read that draining lithium-ion batteries hurts the battery if done repeatedly. Instead I just charge to full then delete battery stats in clockworkrecovery. Battery has been great ever since that and a factory reset.

regP said:
I've never done that. Always read that draining lithium-ion batteries hurts the battery if done repeatedly. Instead I just charge to full then delete battery stats in clockworkrecovery. Battery has been great ever since that and a factory reset.
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Ill keep it till tues/wed and see what happens. If I don't see improvement ill exchange once again
Sent from my LG-P999 using XDA Premium App

regP said:
I've never done that. Always read that draining lithium-ion batteries hurts the battery if done repeatedly. Instead I just charge to full then delete battery stats in clockworkrecovery. Battery has been great ever since that and a factory reset.
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What does deleting the battery stats via ClockWork do? Do you delete them on each charge?
I was getting great battery life and then I used the calibration software and I'm getting good, but slightly less great battery life. Does uninstalling/freezing that app do anything or once it's calibrated, it's done?

The phone has a dual-core processor, and the best GPU you can get in a phone these days, so you can't expect it to get super battery life unless you never use the phone much. I did the calibration once, and have been able to go all day under moderate to heavy use. All day being 8am-7pm and still having ~20% charge.

Sadly my first g2x that I received wasn't able to go through more than 4 hours of standard use even after fully charged the 2nd time. I sent it in last Friday for exchange and now I'm waiting for the 2nd g2x to be send to me. Well see how it goes by then.

@himmelhauk - I noticed in your signature that you have the Paul O'Brien fix... I saw in that thread that that noticeably increased speed/smoothness, but I haven't heard anybody talk about its influence on their battery. Have you noticed a difference in your battery life after making that tweak?

Me
I only calibrated once, and that plus some other simple tweaks i saw great results. I usually get about 20+ hours of medium use(A few calls, non-stop texting, occasional game or youtube video, and checking email every couple of hours). If you want to see what I did you can click the link in my sig.

lobsterhead said:
What does deleting the battery stats via ClockWork do? Do you delete them on each charge?
I was getting great battery life and then I used the calibration software and I'm getting good, but slightly less great battery life. Does uninstalling/freezing that app do anything or once it's calibrated, it's done?
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it gets rid of the battery information stored within the os so that the phone reads the battery charge correctly. this was common practice for vibrant owners after flashing a new ROM. I've seen people saying that this phone has horrid battery drivers so I dunno how that will effect the battery stats but after a factory reset and deleting the stats my battery is double what I was getting on my vibrant.
I only do this after flashing a new ROM or in this case upon getting and setting the phone up. I would do it again if I swapped the battery for a different one also. just charge to 100%, reboot into clockwork, advanced menu, wipe battery stats, done. it DOES NOT increase battery life. it only allows the phone to read the battery more accurately which would keep the phone from thinking its dying when it still has considerable charge left. that's why you hear about people seeing their battery life read 1% yet the phone last for hours.

I only calibrated once because I realized the values were off a bit.

Tried every battery trick in the book. If you actually want to use the phone, nothing will help. Android is a battery eating nightmare. Hopefully one day the platform will mature so adults can use it as a business phone. I think I am returning mine or giving it to my kid.

I did a single calibration and am now seeing 20+ hours with decent usage. Fully charge the battery, use battery calibration app to erase settings, let it drain till it shuts itself off, try pressing the power button to make sure there's no remaining charge, then fully charge to 100% with the phone still off (you can tap the power button while its plugged in and off to briefly bring up a battery indicator on the screen with out actually powering up). Its true that lithium ion batteries last longer if they don't go through fully discharge cycles, but thats referring to repeated occurances, not a rare or occasional situation. And when calibrating, draining from 100 to 0 is the best method of getting a good calibration. Additionally, while its healthy to do the mid charges most of the time, about once a month or so you should do a full drain. This helps keep the calibration accurate (remember that android will continue to modify the file, albeit at a greatly reduced level after the initial discharge of a new calibration, hence why that occasional full discharge is valuable). A full discharge once a month won't significantly reduce your battery's life expectancy.

cbowens said:
let it drain till it shuts itself off, try pressing the power button to make sure there's no remaining charge
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Draining a li-ion battery past the safe shut off is an easy way to damage or completely kill the battery. Your phone is set to shutdown before complete discharge for this reason. The full discharge then charge method was for NiCd batteries. This has no use for lithium-ion batteries.

regP said:
Draining a li-ion battery past the safe shut off is an easy way to damage or completely kill the battery. Your phone is set to shutdown before complete discharge for this reason. The full discharge then charge method was for NiCd batteries. This has no use for lithium-ion batteries.
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True, but the method of attempting to power back up won't actually drain it past the safe point. The point is bad calibrations (either from the factory or by an incomplete calibration) can cause the OS to shut the phone down prematurely during your new calibration run (before the actual safe cut off), resulting in the calibration being off scale. When you attempt to power the phone back on, if it is at the true safety cut off, it won't reactivate, where as if the calibration from before was skewed, it will allow it to boot back up and finish draining down to the safety cut off. This is in line with the reports of people having incorrect readings on battery %, where they have a low number, reset the phone, and suddenly seem to jump up 10 or 20%.

lobsterhead said:
@himmelhauk - I noticed in your signature that you have the Paul O'Brien fix... I saw in that thread that that noticeably increased speed/smoothness, but I haven't heard anybody talk about its influence on their battery. Have you noticed a difference in your battery life after making that tweak?
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I honestly don't know if it made any difference on battery life, as I did the battery calibration before I installed the fix. At any rate, I get much better battery life after the calibration for certain.
Sent from my LG-P999 using XDA Premium App

cbowens said:
True, but the method of attempting to power back up won't actually drain it past the safe point. The point is bad calibrations (either from the factory or by an incomplete calibration) can cause the OS to shut the phone down prematurely during your new calibration run (before the actual safe cut off), resulting in the calibration being off scale. When you attempt to power the phone back on, if it is at the true safety cut off, it won't reactivate, where as if the calibration from before was skewed, it will allow it to boot back up and finish draining down to the safety cut off. This is in line with the reports of people having incorrect readings on battery %, where they have a low number, reset the phone, and suddenly seem to jump up 10 or 20%.
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I dunno about this phone but I know the galaxy s can still be powered on after the safe shut off and drained completely. People were doing exactly that and messing their batteries up. I would hate for people to misunderstand your post and end up making the same mistake. So the LG doesnt let you power on after the safe shutdown unless its connected to a charger? If so thats pretty good. In any case its a lot easy to just use clockwork, terminal emulator, or any other app to delete battery stats once your charged to 100%. No need to drain first

regP said:
I dunno about this phone but I know the galaxy s can still be powered on after the safe shut off and drained completely. People were doing exactly that and messing their batteries up. I would hate for people to misunderstand your post and end up making the same mistake. So the LG doesnt let you power on after the safe shutdown unless its connected to a charger? If so thats pretty good. In any case its a lot easy to just use clockwork, terminal emulator, or any other app to delete battery stats once your charged to 100%. No need to drain first
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I hadn't heard about the Galaxy S phones having that issue. Like I said, I came from the Eris and this method was the way to go with that phone, so perhaps its a manufacturer dependent function. In any case, I agree that the cwm method is better, but I meant my post to be accessable by those who may not have taken that particular plunge yet, since it only requires root. Thanks for the info though; its good to know in advanced that the safety shut off being unavoidable isn't a guarentee on all phones (though frankly it should be).
EDIT: Not sure if I'm reading it wrong, but it sounds like you thought I meant to drain the battery before calibrating, which isn't true; all you need to do precalibration is have the charge at 100%. The only time I was suggesting to drain it is during the actual calibration run, so that Android has a full scale of your battery's range. If thats not what you meant, than ignore this edit. Just wanted to make sure I was explaining myself correctly.

Also, if you open your battery cover and look at the battery, it's not suppose to go above 40 degrees celsius, or 104 degrees fahrenheit. I found that the temperature often goes past this, especially when watching movies for extended periods of time, or playing games, which leads to a significant decrease in battery life because heat and li-ion batteries are not a good combination.

andonnguyen said:
Also, if you open your battery cover and look at the battery, it's not suppose to go above 40 degrees celsius, or 104 degrees fahrenheit. I found that the temperature often goes past this, especially when watching movies for extended periods of time, or playing games, which leads to a significant decrease in battery life because heat and li-ion batteries are not a good combination.
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You can use SetCPU to make a profile according to battery temperature and underclock it when it gets to 40 degrees or something. I have profiles for when the screen is off and for temperature.

lobsterhead said:
You can use SetCPU to make a profile according to battery temperature and underclock it when it gets to 40 degrees or something. I have profiles for when the screen is off and for temperature.
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What r ur temp profiles
Sent from my LG-P999 using XDA Premium App

[Q] Don't shut down when out of battery?

Hi, I been looking around but can't find an answer for this so here goes:
I'd like my phone to NEVER shut down on low battery. I'm not talking about the miss calculated battery stats, but the (I assume) built-in shutdown when I am down to 2-3 % left.
When this happens (I tend to forget to charge my Charge), I usually turn it on and call people back which gives me around 10-30 seconds of talk at least 4-5 times before the phone is finally dead (And showing 0%).
What bugs me is that each time I waste battery on the phone starting up again, checking the SD card, firing up display etc etc. I'd rather spend that juice on talking.
So... anyone know of any tricks to tell the phone to just keep ticking till it cant no more...?
Thanks,

I don't know of a way, and even if I did, that's an extraordinarily bad idea. It shuts down in low battery situations for a reason. This isn't a simple feature phone. Android is a full-fledged Linux operating system, and just losing power can cause major data corruption if it happens at the wrong time.

Data doesn't matter
shrike1978 said:
I don't know of a way, and even if I did, that's an extraordinarily bad idea. It shuts down in low battery situations for a reason. This isn't a simple feature phone. Android is a full-fledged Linux operating system, and just losing power can cause major data corruption if it happens at the wrong time.
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I know this. However, corruption would not be in the firmware, merely in the user storage and I factory reset my phone all the time in the blink of second. Everything I have on the phone is constantly unloaded and easily restored; the phone is in itself just a hub for everything cloud (to use a overused buzzword).
So question is still there

My phone doesn't shut off until it is at critical level, <1% battery. I've even had my phone on before when it was displaying 0% battery, and it didn't turn itself off until it had to. I haven't had my phone shut down on its own until it was essentially dead, both with my Charge and Fascinate.

So...? Recalibrate?
So, it may sound like I need to re-calibrate my battery (again) ?
Is it possible that the phone will need more than one round of charge/drain/charge to show/use the correct battery charge?

It shouldn't if you do it properly. You need to let it cycle from 100% to 0% without restarting, flashing, wiping data, or anything similar. Just charge the phone to 100%, unplug it as soon as you can after it is fully charged, and then allow it to drain until it turns off, and recharge it again fully and you should be good to go.

Also, I thought that I read somewhere that if you ran the battery down to absolute 0, you kill the battery totally

piizzadude said:
Also, I thought that I read somewhere that if you ran the battery down to absolute 0, you kill the battery totally
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You'll never have to worry about that on a cell phone. When the phone shows 0%, you'll still have a bit over 3V in the battery. Cell phones have a very narrow range that they work over (about 4.2-3V). Outside of that, there's not enough voltage to power the phone, so it will never be able to fully discharge the battery.

It is still a really bad idea to drain the battery all the way down to zero. Buy another battery and carry it with you, if you must. Lithium-Ion does not like to be discharged drastically and charged drastically repeatedly. It likes to cycle at a higher range.
It sounds like you are draining the battery as far as you can as often as possible. This is no good in my experience.
I bought the charging dock that charges a spare battery and comes with a spare (OEM) battery also. When ever I go to leave the house and I realize I forgot to charge my phone, I just swap the battery and I have 100% instantly. If this was a problem for me while I was out, or if I go on a long trip, I'd just carry the spare battery with me one way or another.

I'm no technical expert, but it seems like this article may be somewhat relevant to the conversation.

Wiping Battery Stats doesn't improve Battery Life - Says Google Engineer

Just thought this was interesting and hadn't seen it posted elsewhere on the Sensation forum.
https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/FV3LVtdVxPT
The battery indicator in the status/notification bar is a reflection of the batterystats.bin file in the data/system/ directory."
No, it does not.
This file is used to maintain, across reboots, low-level data about the kinds of operations the device and your apps are doing between battery changes. That is, it is solely used to compute the blame for battery usage shown in the "Battery Use" UI in settings.
That is, it has deeply significant things like "app X held a wake lock for 2 minutes" and "the screen was on at 60% brightness for 10 minutes."
It has no impact on the current battery level shown to you.
It has no impact on your battery life.
Deleting it is not going to do anything to make your more device more fantastic and wonderful... well, unless you have some deep hatred for seeing anything shown in the battery usage UI. And anyway, it is reset every time you unplug from power with a relatively full charge (thus why the battery usage UI data resets at that point), so this would be a much easier way to make it go away
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I understand the logic behind it, I do, but I've noticed massive improvements at times when doing this, but only when battery is exceptionally bad for no reason. It's not just a pseudo effect, and it's not just draining and charging the battery. I'm talking consistantly getting a few hours per charge, 3 or 4 full cycles, then I wipe stats, and boom, 12 to 20 hours.
So, I'm just gonna keep doing it, it doesn't hurt either way.

Ofc it does not improve battery life. No one ever said that. Only thing it does is let charge your phone to 100% like you would on a official rom.
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Anyway I still erasing my battery stats ...

It was never suppose to improve your battery life, but give you more accurate reporting of how much battery life is left.

bobdelt said:
It was never suppose to improve your battery life, but give you more accurate reporting of how much battery life is left.
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im agreed with you... it doesnt improve the battery, but give more exact battery porcentage

[Q] Full charge before first use - needed for correct batt. calibration?

Hi guys
I know this question has been asked many times before... whether to fully charge before using the phone the first time.
I believe this is something which stems from the time before Lithium-ion batteries.
However, I wonder if there is something with the battery stats which will be affected by turning on the phone before completely charging the phone?
In CWM there is a Wipe battery stats function... I was thinking if this was deleting some sort of info about the battery which was created the first time the phone is installed....
Some battery stats/calibration or similar is the only thing I can imagine which would benefit from having a full charge before first use. Can somebody enlighten me?
My girlfriend will be buying a new phone tomorrow (HTC Sensation on sale), and I would like to know first if their are any benefits to charging before first use?
Please don't just guess or come with comments like "I just used mine right away, no problems".
Thanks in advance.
BR, Martin

Dont need any calobration soft or fully charged battery. Use it as you need.mentioned soft for calibration is needed when you flash device with new Rom to reset old settings
Regards
Sent from my LG-GT540 using XDA

Fully charging the battery, without intermittently taking it off the charger, running it down fully, then recharging it fully is the best thing to do.

It needs a full charge before the first use so that the phone will understand what a full charge is but that's about it.

mArtinko5MB said:
Dont need any calobration soft or fully charged battery. Use it as you need.mentioned soft for calibration is needed when you flash device with new Rom to reset old settings
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"to reset old settings". When are these settings created? I'm thinking if the original battery settings are created at first boot on a brand new phone.
MissionImprobable said:
It needs a full charge before the first use so that the phone will understand what a full charge is but that's about it.
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How does the phone understand what a full charge is? Does it create some battery settings file at first boot?
If not, then I guess fully charging could be done while the phone is being used by the user?
I haven't become more certain from the above answers... I still don't know if the phone somehow does a calibration to the fully charged battery which could be a reason for charging it before first boot.

icepally said:
Fully charging the battery, without intermittently taking it off the charger, running it down fully, then recharging it fully is the best thing to do.
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no offence, but this is bull****. This treatment of battery was good for old mobiles and absolutelly not neccessary for smartphones. Don't mess with him. I didn't fully charged battery in first use, now on my gt 540 with optimized 2.3.7 can get 5 day on battery !
Don't be confused by battery settings, they are stored in system, you mustn't bother with that.
Fully charged means 100% shown on status bar, nothing more nothing less. System know how to treat battery, no need for calibration(it's needed only when changing ROM -> new system -> new treat -> need to reset old settings)
Your only task with battery is, once a month drain her to 0% and charged to 100% without abortion (but also not neccessary), and charging mainly when 30-40% of battery. It's not recommended to go under there values for good life of battery
Regards

Please use the Q&A Forum for questions &
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Moving to Q&A

mArtinko5MB said:
no offence, but this is bull****. This treatment of battery was good for old mobiles and absolutelly not neccessary for smartphones. Don't mess with him. I didn't fully charged battery in first use, now on my gt 540 with optimized 2.3.7 can get 5 day on battery !
Don't be confused by battery settings, they are stored in system, you mustn't bother with that.
Fully charged means 100% shown on status bar, nothing more nothing less. System know how to treat battery, no need for calibration(it's needed only when changing ROM -> new system -> new treat -> need to reset old settings)
Your only task with battery is, once a month drain her to 0% and charged to 100% without abortion (but also not neccessary), and charging mainly when 30-40% of battery. It's not recommended to go under there values for good life of battery
Regards
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I agree.
Fully charging and discharging was a practice to deal with the memory effect of older NIMH or NICD batteries.
Putting unnecessary charge cycles on todays cell batteries, just lessens their lifetime. They all offer an amount of charge cycles and each cycle reduces their capacity. The detailed amount of chargecycles that is sometimes in some infos, is usually something like after X amount of charge cycles the battery reaches 80% of its original capacity.
I'm not sure but i would guess that the phones determine the charge status through hardcoded characteristics of the used battery type, i.e. voltage dropoff etc. Fully charged at 4.22V, etc etc.
The batteries in our phones don't come fully charged is probably because storing these types of batteries at full charge for too long actually hurts them.
Storing them at something like ~3.8V is recommended for longer periods.
I'm no expert on this topic, so tell me if you find something wrong in my statement , i'm eager to learn.

Already proven
I wish I could find the article, but there was an experiment run on lithium ion batteries, particularly based on proliferation of mobile and these exact questions, where they ran down/recharged in different scenarios (different discharge percentages) until the battery went bad. They determined that the more you charge (the less you let it drain before re-charging), the more cycles your battery lasts. So it's as some have said, exact opposite of an old NiXX tech. This was done to < 10% increments, so they showed even a decrease in cycles between recharging at 95% and 90%
Moral of the story, don't let you're battery drain completely or even get too low, and charge as often as you can. This is why I use a dock on my desk at work.

New Phone Question

How long should I let the battery run down before I charge it again?

After I've installed all the apps I want and need, I charge my phone to a 100% then I let it run untill it shutsdown due to lack of power.
After that, I charge whenever I feel like it. Sometimes, if I suspect something is wrong with my battery, I repeat the process. I think that's maybe once in two/three months. Usually a bad flash, or some program with a bad update.
There is no need to drain the battery. If I don't need to I don't charge my battery at night (not with more than 40% and a charger at work).

In fact, completely killing li-ion batteries will reduce their life.
Killing batteries completely and charging them back up applied to NiCD etc batteries - older batteries... not modern ones.
Don't kill li-ion batteries, it is not good for them!

You can't kill them. Not in these phone's. They're always protected, which is also why they shutdown. Your phone will boot at least 10 times after a forcefull shutdown (I tried ). So no need to worry, the battery protection in Motorola's work just fine.

After flashing a new ROM you should always recalibrate your battery by using one of many free apps (I use "Battery Calibration") that will wipe the battery stats. If you start to notice big dips in your battery % for no apparent reason or your phone stays on much longer than it should have with only 1% battery then you're probably needing another calibration.
Basically you'll charge your phone to 100% then take it down to 0 then charge back to 100% without interruption.
I have noticed my meter is much more accurate if I do this after each flash (though I'm too lazy to as I am on nightlies so I do it about once a week).