Database Info

[Aug 7th] Investigating battery capacity claims. First run of AMZER (EVO) complete.

Hello Google Android world, please welcome this shameful WinMo apostate into your ranks right away because I'm honestly a good guy who wants to start helping you all buy more batteries smartly as, when it comes to capacity claims of everyone other than HTC that I know of so far, you are in a sea of lies and gross exaggerations. I know this from publicly testing ten batteries for the HTC Touch Pro2/Rhodium/Tilt 2, batteries from the same factories that stamped out many of the third party batteries being sold for the N1, including batteries made by Mugen and Seidio.
As of now for the N1 I have tested the OEM which is rated at 1400mAh, two Seidios and an oversized Cameron Sino. At a 250mA current over a discharge from the phone's charging cutoff down to the phone shutdown cutoff (~4.14V and 3.5V respectively), the OEM clocked in at 1357mAh, or 97% of its claimed capacity. That is the best claimed versus actual figure I've seen so far (update: except for a new TP2 2150mAh), though on par with the Touch Pro2's OEMs which I tested, also in the mid 90s. So I say hello a little short on information, inviting any of you who want to help find the truth to let me borrow your batteries to test after which, as I've been doing with the TP2 crowd, I would fedex them right back. Also the information I can bring to the table you can use to get an idea of what to expect from their N1 counterparts.
How this works:
I am using the Computerized Battery Analyzer III. The software which is somewhat sophisticated plots out milliamp hours (mAh) burnt over the descent of voltage from 4.14V to 3.5V, the level of voltage in the batteries at which point the HTC/Google Nexus One and the Touch Pro2s decide to stop charging itself and decide it's time to turn themselves off because they're too low on juice. The CBA software plots out data in graphs, PDFs, CSVs, the whole deal. I hook the batteries up to the CBA which is plugged into my computer. With the software that came with the CBA I have the CBA test the batteries at 250mA, a current in the neighborhood of what the average user would average were he to do his thing (including having push-mail fired up with the screen on bright, downloading and browsing rss feeds, the occasional call, the occasional call being recorded etc) without interruption. Looks a little like this:
I'm not Colombo out to get the third party guys that exaggerate their numbers a little bit nor am I here to rewrite Wikipedia's take on capacity calculation industry standards. You know what? Scratch that, I'm starting to hate these guys, lying and overcharging way too much. If you're a manufacturer or a battery company sympathizer and want to break my balls about voltage cutoffs, read this simple explanation which I feel sums up our position well.
Tl;dr? This is to supply you with information that will help you choose which battery to buy. And to hurt the crooks.
Doug Simmons

Test results and other info.
This table is a hotlinked image to data on the mother site of this, batteryboss.org on which the actual links work. Hit refresh if you've been here before in case your browser cached the image.
Updates:
August 7th: After doing a dry run I ran the AMZER 1800mAh for the EVO. So far it's in first place for being the biggest ripoff on the gallon. First place.
August 5th: Received Carl's AMZER 1800mAh for EVO, doing a dry run discharge now, hopefully get some data for you tomorrow morning.
July 28th: Finished Carl's Seidio 3500mAh for EVO 4G.
July 6th: Completed round one of EVO stock (John Doward). Got the coveted Amzer 1800 and a Seidio 3500, both EVO, en route thanks to Carl Willi.
June 12th: Completed first run of a Mugen 3200mAh for the Hero. Both disappointing and unsurprising. Most cost ineffective battery I've tested.
June 11th: Jasper and Dan's batteries on the way back to them. Thanks again. Hey, Mugen 3200 for Hero and EVO 4G stock on their way! Hey, just got the Mugen. Charging.
June 10th: Completed testing for a no name Hero battery and the stock Incredible battery with the EVO 4G stock on its way. Nice. Returning those batteries to my man Dan and my other man Jasper. Hey, anyone wanna send me that Amzer 1800 for the EVO? Please?
June 7th: Just ran test number one of a no name oversized Hero battery. Underwhelming. Almost done with second test.
April 26th: Ran the Seidio 1600 again after deep cycling a bit (got worse). Got some press!
April 16th: Mailed back Wade his oem 2150 yesterday, today will mail Sean's bad Mugen back to Mugen so he can finally get a damn refund, also mailing back Roto his Cameron Sino 2400 as the testing's done. Currently experimenting with a high then low (repeat 3x) current thing with Roto's Seidio 1600 to see if it produces a more flattering result (his idea). Much obliged fellas.
April 15th: Latest test of a Touch Pro2 HTC/OEM 2150mAh scored 2150mAh on the frickin' dot! Not an N1 battery but just goes to show that if you don't like being lied to, go OEM. Finish oversized Cameron Sino.
April 14th: Was going to have another run of the 1600 ready for you but the god damned windows update forced a reboot last night. Argh. Anyway, just got a Touch Pro2 2150 HTC/OEM battery. Though it's not for our phone, it's worth knowing whether or not HTC can maintain its batting average for its oversized batteries so this will yield important information for you folks. Friggin' windows updates. What the hell is that, Microsoft, forcing reboots? Oh, easily disabled if you hit start > run > blahblah.msc > whatever > whatever? FU MS. /rant
April 13th: Finished first run of the Cameron Sino 2400mAh, weighing in at 2025mAh. Nothing to write home about in terms of a company not exaggerating about their capacity but hey, that's a pretty good price. Unlike the oversized Seidio 3200 this one does come with a back door whereas Seidio is too cool to hook you up with that.
April 12th: Rotohammer's Seidio 1600mAh has arrived, charging. First run of Seidio 1600 an unsurprising disappointment. A Cameron Sino 2400mAh also arrived (thanks Roto) and is just about fully charged for its first run.
April 9th: In a continued effort to outdo himself Rotohammer just ordered a 2400mAh-rated Cameron Sino, on its way to me. Lucky I got his attention. Extremely helpful. Thanks.
April 8th: N1 Seidio 1600mAh should show up today, thanks to Rotohammer.
April 3rd: Finished Seidio 3200mAh, five runs. Learned that it's rated slightly more honestly than Mugen but is the most expensive battery per tested amp hour. Still, highest capacity. I got a new and fast and really badass server and now have a our own forum which you can fire up at forum.batteryboss.org. Finished the new Andida for the TP2, pretty weak, but for some of you the price may be right.
March 30th: Completed dry run of a Seidio 3200mAh. Need to test it at least two more times for conditioning and accuracy but Seidio is now in the lead against Mugen in terms of not lying so much about their claimed capacity. Good job, Seidio.
March 29th: Mugen engineers respond (see table). Rotohammer's Seidio arrived, charging now baby, yeah! Should be very interesting.
March 27th: Rotohammer's sponsoring a test of a Seidio 3200mAh, battery en route. Thanks.
March 20th: Just ran the first test of the Nexus One's OEM, not bad.
March 18th: Just ordered a Google Nexus One. I got an extra battery so the first thing I'm using this for is to prepare a battery for testing. Need to figure out if it has different voltage cutoffs, need to figure out how to present the data and what to do with my site, .. hmmm.
Copypasta from TP2 thread:
March 16th: Mugen wants me to send me another battery to test, I agreed and mailed them back Jeremy's battery. Also mailed Sean/Telek his OEM 1500mAh. Thank you both fellas. Also DeathmonkeyGTX offered to sponsor a test of the HTC 2150mAh -- thank you!
March 13th: Finished no name #2 3600mAh (2466mAh ). In search of voltage cutoffs for Touch Pro/Fuze, please help.
March 12th: Mugen has expressed interest in sending me another battery to test, I expressed willingness. And to you I express curiosity into which device to expand the testing.
March 8th:Finished round two of no name #2 and fake OEM #2. Waiting on another ebay OEM to verify authenticity and a fresh Andida courtesy of my main man Shawn Martell.
March 7th:Added intriguing head to head chart matches.
March 6th:Completed a few more including fresh standard legit OEM, also discovered two counterfeits.
March 2nd: Completed no name #1, cheapest per mAh so far. Dropped Jason's battery off in the mail as promised.
Feb 28th: Completed tests of the Seidio, mailing it to jasonweaver.
Feb 27th: Just received Seidio 1750mAh from jasonweaver in addition to 1500mAh no name ebay cheapo. Nice.
Feb 27th: Mugen 1800mAh testing completed, table updated. Thank you very much jcr916 who bought the battery and had it shipped to me, now I'm going to mail it to him.
Feb 22nd: Thank you jasonweaver and jcr916 who are hooking me up with a barely-used Seidio and a brand new Mugen 1800mAh respectively. Those test results should be interesting as from what I've gathered those two brands have the best reputation and are priced accordingly so let's see if they deserve it.
Telek and I just laid down some dough for five more batteries this weekend. So I'll have a lot of testing to do shortly. Stay tuned for the results!
Testing hardware:
I am using the West Mountain Radio CBA III (Computerized Battery Analyzer) which you can buy along with some toys from these guys for $149. I bought something else from them, didn't like it and they offered to shave the cost of the thing I didn't want off the price of the CBA III without even asking me to return it. Good people. The CBA III is the most accurate and reliable device we could find for these testing purposes and we spent many hours arriving at the final testing procedure. No corners cut. There is no indication whatsoever that the results it's produced are inaccurate, certainly not relative to each other given its consistency. All testing procedures were identical including the current of 250mA, starting voltage and bottom cutoff (4.14V and 3.5V respectively, the top and bottom cutoffs of the Touch Pro2, which I use to charge the batteries with original HTC wall charger). The 250mA current may be a little high and won't produce as flattering a result versus a 100mA current, but it's both a normal current we burn when we're doing stuff on the phone, it keeps each of the three tests inside six hours usually and most importantly we use that current on every single test of every single battery so this is a standardized test. Finally the OEMs get 95% of their claimed rating on this current so we believe that that current is the sweet spot to supply you with information to use to buy your next battery.
Doug Simmons

Want to help?
First I'd like to thank Sean Graham, Jeremey Riley, Jason Weaver, Shawn Martell and Wade Woosley who've decided to do the following for me with TP2 batteries:
The next time you decide to buy a battery, hit me with a PM first so that I can give you my address. Have the battery shipped to me, I'll test the sucker then I'll hit up FedEx and get it to you asap. I have to test the battery at least three times for posterity so give me three or so days to shoot it over to you. I'll write a bit about how grateful I am you decided to help this project, yada yada, and we'll all be happier as a result. This is very valuable information and I know the batteries are also valuable to you so just borrowing your brand new battery for a little while, I realize, is a tall order. But that's a great way to help everyone out without spending a dime. I'll cover the postage to get it to you, I'm not asking for donations, I just want to run the damn tests.
Already have a third party battery but want me to test it anyway? Yes please, I am still interested in used batteries, including used OEMs to get an idea of longevity.
So once I survey the scene for shopping links I'll use this third post to list the batteries on my Christmas list.

Interesting post. Keep it up, love the idea behind this. Is it possible for you to determine how long before the n1 battery goes below 60% of its capacity by chance? and is there anyway to best optimize them for longer life?

This is a great reference. thanks
Do you think you can use your machinery to test the difference between two OEM batteries, running different kernels? For example this Undervolted kernel by Kmobs, a lot of people would be interested in seeing hard stats in the difference in battery useage over the stock kernel.

tips
ram130 said:
Interesting post. Keep it up, love the idea behind this. Is it possible for you to determine how long before the n1 battery goes below 60% of its capacity by chance? and is there anyway to best optimize them for longer life?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks! As I said I am brand new to Android so I can't tell you what software to use on the phone, including roms and screen brightness managers, to make a single charge go another few miles. I can however, and this may have been what you were asking, tell you that the more you use the battery at lower charges, like below 30%, the faster you'll eventually wear it out. So the more you charge the better. Another thing I can tell you is that the hotter the battery runs the sooner you'll kill its longevity. So heavy things like tethering and youtube for extended periods will lead you to having to buy another battery significantly quicker than if you ran up your miles (milliamp hours) on lower currents. For individual discharges, one thing you may not know is that when the phone is on 3G and you're getting a weak signal or the phone, in GSM world, is on 3G but can only find itself an edge tower, the phone beefs up its transmitting power a lot. If you don't need 3G, especially if you're in a rural area where your signal isn't always strong or you're not getting any 3G (or in an unlucky corner of your office), maybe flip off 3G. I don't know if there's a setting for this on Android like there is on WinBlow but keep your wifi power setting on the lowest unless you know its affecting your wifi negatively too much.
Whenever you've got a data connection open, you're losing a lot more juice. So if you care more about your charge lasting than you do about constant immediate emailing, really frequent RSS updates and so on, go easy on the frequency so that you're using data only when necessary. If you go that route, remember to change all your synced stuff accordingly otherwise it won't help much if you switch your Gmail cycling down to a half hour but forget to turn your Facebook syncing off immediate.
There may be something like this for Android and if there is someone please mention it, but for WinMo, WMLongLife by Chainfire, author of WMWifiRouter, is a radio management program that very smartly decides when to ramp up and down to and from 3G and when to kill the data connection. If something like that does not exist and you're a programmer, check the thread for inspiration. Great if you want to save juice without devoting your life to toggling 3G all the time yourself.
Back to heavy use, if you do have a spare battery, I would advise designating one of them with a sharpie to be the battery you use during periods of your life, like watching videos on a long flight or running GPS software (especially Navigation since it uses not only a lot of processor and does the GPS math but it also uses data) when on road trips, even and especially if you've plugged it in to your cigarette lighter, go with the designated batter for those purposes, that way you can preserve one good battery to make it through a long day of work with no problem without much degradation. Your other battery will wear out faster of course, so for that consider a cheapo no name which, once I get my hands on some cheapo no names, you can buy wisely from information I give you. Don't trust their information, their ratings have no bearing on reality whatsoever. I'll give you actionable data as soon as I can test them.
Third party standalone chargers = BAD idea. Odds are, and certainly if the charger has two pins instead of four, that it gives a constant current charge unlike the OEM which goes hard when it's safe (when the battery's got empty room and is not hot) and then scales back when it senses that it needs to. That means the OEM charger that came with your phone or your phone itself when you plug in another source whether it's the wall charger or USB, or a standalone if you find one that's definitely HTC. The constant current chargers give a weaker charge than it could during most of the charge and then too strong a charge during the final clip. So that way, even though it may fill the tank up all the way, it takes longer to charge and it will hurt your battery's longevity. By how much? Can't tell you, but because of the threat of one of these dinko chargers not even having something to detect the cutoff voltage, ... bad idea, don't trust them unless you're using it on a $6 cheapo.
liam.lah said:
This is a great reference. thanks
Do you think you can use your machinery to test the difference between two OEM batteries, running different kernels? For example this Undervolted kernel by Kmobs, a lot of people would be interested in seeing hard stats in the difference in battery useage over the stock kernel.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
And thank you.
When I test batteries with this thing, I charge the battery and hook it up to the tester, not the tester into the phone to see what's doing with the battery as its being used by the phone. So I'm not testing to see how much different software, whether it's a strobe light program, HTC Sense, a custom rom or an underclocking mod, let you get the same happy phone experience while putting a lighter load on the battery. Rather I hook the thing up and tell the tester what load to put onto the battery (I use 250mA) and collect the data in the exact same way as I do for every battery I test. I'm brand new to Android and, though I'm loving it, I haven't even tried to root it yet, let alone experiment with different kernels.
From my experience with WinMo custom roms, I have never found a custom rom that had more battery drain than it would to its stock counterpart -- if that counterpart was running similar things like Sense instead of the old TouchFlo. I imagine your chefs or whatever you call them are pretty competent when it comes to making battery tweaks and trade-off decisions, however some roms will likely burn more rubber in order to deliver you more eye candy. In my old world there are barebones roms that have everything stripped down just to the point where the thing can boot, thereby delivering the best speed, most free ram, program stability and battery performance. Were I to flash one of your custom roms, once I got over my eye-candy phase at least and prioritized battery performance, I'd go for the new kernels with the least frills and install the frills myself as needed.
So I got my N1 last Friday and was immediately addicted, wailing on the thing, wishing I had immediately gone Android the moment it was first released instead of trying to run messy ported on my WinMo phone which is now collecting dust. That phone, parenthetically, takes a 1500mAh battery whereas the N1 takes 1400mAh. In spite of that, and in spite of the N1 having a larger screen, crazy fast processor and just being much more badass in general, lasts significantly longer than the WinMo phone on a single charge. Both are HTC phones so, unless the screen technology is really a whole lot different, to account for that I can only account for it with superior software. It's been so good to the point that I have been unsure that this project would get much attention from you folks than it's been getting from the WinMo crowd as they may be much more starved for battery information than you.
I love this thing.
If any of you have more advice than that please dump it here.
Doug

Mugen
I'm not surprised by the issue with The Mugen Power battery. I've had problems with them in the past.
See:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=2097942&postcount=47
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=2104774&postcount=50
I prefer to see a test done on a customers battery, not hand selected units from the manufacturer.
d0ugie said:
So I got my N1 last Friday and was immediately addicted, wailing on the thing, wishing I had immediately gone Android the moment it was first released instead of trying to run messy ported on my WinMo phone which is now collecting dust.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I felt the same way! And since I've been a Linux user for 15 years, It feels sooo good to be fully Microsoft free!

Damnit damnit, Mugen asked me to test another in case the one they sent was defective, asking that I mail it to them first, and I went ahead and mailed it to them, figuring I had enough data, and this not occurring to me. I didn't send back the counterfeits because I wanted to hang onto evidence for who knows what but it never occurred to me that whoever cooked up their batteries might have actually labeled them with different ratings. That is absolutely stunning. At least we've got the picture you took. Ouch man, that would really have pissed me off if I had bought a battery from a company I thought was reputable and saw that -- on top of the suspiciously underwhelming performance that led me to dissect it.
Still haven't received anything from Mugen, going to follow up with them. Also just let the guy know who bought that battery for me to test to get in on your discovery to find out how he wants to handle this, assuming they send me another. Other than saying they would I don't know why they'd bother.
Thanks for that, huge help, though also a huge disappointment.

dude! I love this thread I've always been careful when it comes to batteries, bought the nexus seidio 2800 mah battery and I can say there is no way I'm getting double life that they claim.
That should be the next battery to test out even though they only have the 3200 mah one now.
-Charlie

Let Mugen do the right thing and replace an under performing unit. If they want to play games, I'll have 10 people each buy a Mugen battery, I'll send them to you for testing, then open each of them up on video. If they try to deceive me, I'll setup a website dedicated to exposing any fraud.
Rule: Never piss off a geek with resources to prove a point.

d0ugie said:
Thanks! As I said I am brand new to Android so I can't tell you what software to use on the phone, including roms and screen brightness managers, to make a single charge go another few miles. I can however, and this may have been what you were asking, tell you that the more you use the battery at lower charges, like below 30%, the faster you'll eventually wear it out. So the more you charge the better. Another thing I can tell you is that the hotter the battery runs the sooner you'll kill its longevity. So heavy things like tethering and youtube for extended periods will lead you to having to buy another battery significantly quicker than if you ran up your miles (milliamp hours) on lower currents. For individual discharges, one thing you may not know is that when the phone is on 3G and you're getting a weak signal or the phone, in GSM world, is on 3G but can only find itself an edge tower, the phone beefs up its transmitting power a lot. If you don't need 3G, especially if you're in a rural area where your signal isn't always strong or you're not getting any 3G (or in an unlucky corner of your office), maybe flip off 3G. I don't know if there's a setting for this on Android like there is on WinBlow but keep your wifi power setting on the lowest unless you know its affecting your wifi negatively too much.
Whenever you've got a data connection open, you're losing a lot more juice. So if you care more about your charge lasting than you do about constant immediate emailing, really frequent RSS updates and so on, go easy on the frequency so that you're using data only when necessary. If you go that route, remember to change all your synced stuff accordingly otherwise it won't help much if you switch your Gmail cycling down to a half hour but forget to turn your Facebook syncing off immediate.
There may be something like this for Android and if there is someone please mention it, but for WinMo, WMLongLife by Chainfire, author of WMWifiRouter, is a radio management program that very smartly decides when to ramp up and down to and from 3G and when to kill the data connection. If something like that does not exist and you're a programmer, check the thread for inspiration. Great if you want to save juice without devoting your life to toggling 3G all the time yourself.
----------------
Doug
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you so much for your post. I am truely learning alot from you and thank you for the advice. I will be sure to follow them trust me. I got two questions though, do you think its best to charge your phone off or on? Also my battery was at 15% while on a call then I plugged in. After about 10min I hang up and now its charging while on, its been 12min and so for its at a whopping 106* F, really hot..is that normal? I know heat is bad, but I can't do anything to fix it.

d0ugie said:
Third party standalone chargers = BAD idea. Odds are, and certainly if the charger has two pins instead of four, that it gives a constant current charge unlike the OEM which goes hard when it's safe (when the battery's got empty room and is not hot) and then scales back when it senses that it needs to. That means the OEM charger that came with your phone or your phone itself when you plug in another source whether it's the wall charger or USB, or a standalone if you find one that's definitely HTC. The constant current chargers give a weaker charge than it could during most of the charge and then too strong a charge during the final clip. So that way, even though it may fill the tank up all the way, it takes longer to charge and it will hurt your battery's longevity. By how much? Can't tell you, but because of the threat of one of these dinko chargers not even having something to detect the cutoff voltage, ... bad idea, don't trust them unless you're using it on a $6 cheapo.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What do you mean standalone? i bought a motorola phone charger because the US pins don't fit here, i did notice the output is lower, so i expect long charge time. Is that still going to have the same problem not throttling it down at the end.
I suppose my best bet is a pair of pliers to bend the htc charger pins to fit in our wall sockets.
Also, in regards to heavy, for example navigation+ music in a car. Does having it plugged in to power help with that? what happens when it is simultaneously charging and discharging? I also suppse a good tip is to place the mount in front of an air-conditioning vent too, if it is a warm day, the phone will get super hot in minutes, but if you are air con-ing, it will stay cool.

ram130 said:
Thank you so much for your post. I am truely learning alot from you and thank you for the advice. I will be sure to follow them trust me. I got two questions though, do you think its best to charge your phone off or on? Also my battery was at 15% while on a call then I plugged in. After about 10min I hang up and now its charging while on, its been 12min and so for its at a whopping 106* F, really hot..is that normal? I know heat is bad, but I can't do anything to fix it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Charging the battery and using the battery both create heat. That said, the total heat you'd get from charging during casual use of the battery should not be great enough to warrant the nuisance of not being able to keep your phone on until you finish charging it each time. But 106F (41 Celsius) is indeed whopping hot and, according to not necessarily precise software tests I did on other HTC devices, that is the neighborhood of heat at which the phone eases back the charging current to the point where the phone may either charge at a current about even with what your phone is burning, leaving it without any net gain while running at too hot a temperature for the health of your battery or it will begin to drop the charging current toward zero so that your phone is discharging, waiting until the temperature simmers down until it turns the juice back up.
But what the hell is causing this if you didn't have things like wifi and GPS and streaming video going while talking to someone on your earpiece at the same time? Could be a runaway process, something whacky with something software related, something wrong with the battery, something wrong with the phone or something messed up with the charger. Since you plugged the phone in and didn't use a separate third party charger into which you plop the battery to charge, since the phone was involved, it's probably not the charger. My first guess would be something sketchy software-wise. The first thing I'd do is go into Settings > About phone > Battery use and seeing if anything looks crazy when it lists what software or functions are accounting for how much of the drain relative to each other. If something is burning juice harder than the screen, the good news is is that it might not be a hardware issue, might be something that could be solved with a soft reset. Could just have been a fluke. Can you recreate the problem? If you shut the phone completely off and it appears to charge without overheating, my guess is that the hardware is okay and there is no defect. And in that case, task management and auto-killing programs may be of interest.
liam.lah said:
What do you mean standalone? i bought a motorola phone charger because the US pins don't fit here, i did notice the output is lower, so i expect long charge time. Is that still going to have the same problem not throttling it down at the end.
I suppose my best bet is a pair of pliers to bend the htc charger pins to fit in our wall sockets.
Also, in regards to heavy, for example navigation+ music in a car. Does having it plugged in to power help with that? what happens when it is simultaneously charging and discharging? I also suppse a good tip is to place the mount in front of an air-conditioning vent too, if it is a warm day, the phone will get super hot in minutes, but if you are air con-ing, it will stay cool.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
By standalone and third party I meant one of those little cheapo things you plug into the wall, generally without any wiring, and you put the battery into it instead of charging the battery while it's in your phone. Unless it's the OEM, there is some small danger to using these things but the convenience and cheapness, if you use multiple batteries, may make it worth using anyway, though I'd keep your OEM battery away from it and only use cheap third parties in it.
I'm 80% sure that as long as your phone's involved, meaning the battery's in the phone and something is plugged into the phone to charge it, if you use a weaker charger .... no I'm not 80% sure, let me ask Telek first. But if you've got an outlet that packs a voltage that the charger is indicated to be able to handle, typically 110-220 volts or in that neighborhood, then it's just a matter of getting the thing plugged in (safely) whether you buy a cheap adapter or go nuts with paperclips.
When it's charging and discharging, that's two things heating it up, but I'd be surprised if a serious AC made enough of a difference to make it worth moving the phone to where you otherwise wouldn't mount it. In spite of the extra heat from also charging the phone, running it on a low charge is also not great for longevity purposes but I think, I'm speculating, outweighed by the heat. If your battery's running in excess of 40c, that's not an ideal situation, but hey, you gotta drive sometimes and not devote your life to air conditioning alignment and plugging and unplugging your car charger constantly. I've done enough speculating -- Telek's the expert on this, let him weigh in.

d0ugie said:
Charging the battery and using the battery both create heat. That said, the total heat you'd get from charging during casual use of the battery should not be great enough to warrant the nuisance of not being able to keep your phone on until you finish charging it each time. But 106F (41 Celsius) is indeed whopping hot and, according to not necessarily precise software tests I did on other HTC devices, that is the neighborhood of heat at which the phone eases back the charging current to the point where the phone may either charge at a current about even with what your phone is burning, leaving it without any net gain while running at too hot a temperature for the health of your battery or it will begin to drop the charging current toward zero so that your phone is discharging, waiting until the temperature simmers down until it turns the juice back up.
But what the hell is causing this if you didn't have things like wifi and GPS and streaming video going while talking to someone on your earpiece at the same time? Could be a runaway process, something whacky with something software related, something wrong with the battery, something wrong with the phone or something messed up with the charger. Since you plugged the phone in and didn't use a separate third party charger into which you plop the battery to charge, since the phone was involved, it's probably not the charger. My first guess would be something sketchy software-wise. The first thing I'd do is go into Settings > About phone > Battery use and seeing if anything looks crazy when it lists what software or functions are accounting for how much of the drain relative to each other. If something is burning juice harder than the screen, the good news is is that it might not be a hardware issue, might be something that could be solved with a soft reset. Could just have been a fluke. Can you recreate the problem? If you shut the phone completely off and it appears to charge without overheating, my guess is that the hardware is okay and there is no defect. And in that case, task management and auto-killing programs may be of interest.
.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Exactly my point. What the hell could be causing it. Today I did a master reset once more, mainly angry with how things where running. Its fast again and so far I have not tried reproducing the situation as yet. I only use GPS for 5min total, mainly for directions. But I'm curious though, I had requested another battery from HTC because the one that came with the phone was losing charge too quickly(10% in hour). So far the new battery was working alot better, but now its the same. I keep hearing people say they get day and half of battery life with regular use and have 3G on. Yet my battery won't pass a day(by night its dead). I only have certain things like news and weather running and refreshing every 3hours to 6hours. I don't have twitter, facebook running or nothing like that. The screen is on auto and it happens wether 3G or EDGE is on. Only 2 hours more with EDGE. Am I doing something wrong? I feel like a complete ediat with two batteries.
I followed all advise, even turn it off during charging. Letting it die completely, tried 4 times this week. Its a regular thing letting it die completely since by the time I'm home I don't charge right way. Mainly because I would be expecting calls. My only option seems to be root unless you can shed some light. I can get a day or more if I leave the brightness on low, no internet or EDGE or no browsing and email syncing, don't fool around with my phone, with only a total of 20min calls during the day. Seems ridiculous to do that since others do ALOT than me and get better battey life. I feel like buy 2 more batteries now..its driving me crazy.

ram130 said:
Exactly my point. What the hell could be causing it. Today I did a master reset once more, mainly angry with how things where running. Its fast again and so far I have not tried reproducing the situation as yet. I only use GPS for 5min total, mainly for directions. But I'm curious though, I had requested another battery from HTC because the one that came with the phone was losing charge too quickly(10% in hour). So far the new battery was working alot better, but now its the same. I keep hearing people say they get day and half of battery life with regular use and have 3G on. Yet my battery won't pass a day(by night its dead). I only have certain things like news and weather running and refreshing every 3hours to 6hours. I don't have twitter, facebook running or nothing like that. The screen is on auto and it happens wether 3G or EDGE is on. Only 2 hours more with EDGE. Am I doing something wrong? I feel like a complete ediat with two batteries.
I followed all advise, even turn it off during charging. Letting it die completely, tried 4 times this week. Its a regular thing letting it die completely since by the time I'm home I don't charge right way. Mainly because I would be expecting calls. My only option seems to be root unless you can shed some light. I can get a day or more if I leave the brightness on low, no internet or EDGE or no browsing and email syncing, don't fool around with my phone, with only a total of 20min calls during the day. Seems ridiculous to do that since others do ALOT than me and get better battey life. I feel like buy 2 more batteries now..its driving me crazy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well sucks. Sorry man.
So you did a hard reset, restoring everything to how it was out of the box, and it still sucks. This might be a longshot but do you happen to be in an area where you typically don't get a full signal? ... and could you see what happens if you go to Settings > About phone > Battery use? It might reveal clues though if you did a hard reset and it didn't help, that suggests some kind of hardware problem I hate to say. Download a battery monitor app and see what kind of temperature you get when using the phone normally. If it's not that high but the thing drains fast, then maybe it's the battery, secondary to what could initially have been a software problem that worked the battery so exhaustingly that it's now behaving like this without the software problem.
That's right though, what people are saying, at least for most of us; I am getting so much better life than I used to on my WinMo phone, free at last. I used to have a second charger, one at my desk, the other by my bed. Not necessary anymore. I bought a spare battery but I haven't had to use it yet. Only used it to run tests for this project.
Any chance you're still under warranty? Don't lose hope just yet man, we might be able to get out of this. Check that battery use thing.

d0ugie said:
Well sucks. Sorry man.
So you did a hard reset, restoring everything to how it was out of the box, and it still sucks. This might be a longshot but do you happen to be in an area where you typically don't get a full signal? ... and could you see what happens if you go to Settings > About phone > Battery use? It might reveal clues though if you did a hard reset and it didn't help, that suggests some kind of hardware problem I hate to say. Download a battery monitor app and see what kind of temperature you get when using the phone normally. If it's not that high but the thing drains fast, then maybe it's the battery, secondary to what could initially have been a software problem that worked the battery so exhaustingly that it's now behaving like this without the software problem.
That's right though, what people are saying, at least for most of us; I am getting so much better life than I used to on my WinMo phone, free at last. I used to have a second charger, one at my desk, the other by my bed. Not necessary anymore. I bought a spare battery but I haven't had to use it yet. Only used it to run tests for this project.
Any chance you're still under warranty? Don't lose hope just yet man, we might be able to get out of this. Check that battery use thing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well so far its been 1hr 32min since I turned it on. I made 5min call and sen a few texts. I'm 94% now and this is what battery use is showing:
Voice calls 39%
Display 29%
Cell standby 7%
Android system 6%
Phone idle 6%
wifi 4%
Gallery 3% (WEIRD, have not went in there)
Android OS 3%
Google 2%
Current temp: 86.9*
Voltage: 4.0.84v
I took some pictures of it. Please note, to take pics I had to plug in via usb, using the SDK.

Lets have some fun!
I found a brand new Seidio 3200mAh battery from when I had a Motorola Q, and since I have no use for the Q or Verizon, the battery is just screaming "Open Me Up!"
View attachment 299144
Heres whats inside: 3 unmarked cells that are 32x48mm.
View attachment 299145
Compare that with the aprox 52x42mm N1 battery, we can do some math:
Code:
32x48 x
------ = ----- x=940mAh/cell * 3cells = 2820mAh total
52x44 1400
Of course this is just an approximation. The cells should be 1066mAh each, and they very well could be. I'm happy to see 3 cells in there
The new Seidio N1 battery is 52x44mm 9.5mm thick vs 4.75mm thick for the stock battery.
Simple math here, I bet theres two 1400mAh cells in it Although, they do sell a 1600mAh battery, so If thats true, then this battery could have two 1600mAh cells in it.
I weighed each cell in grams:
Code:
N1 1400mAh 30g
MQ 3200mAh 56g
N1 3200mAh 58g
N1 2400mAh 51g
Edit: Added Cameron Sino 2400.
Accounting for packaging, It sure looks like the two 3200mAh batteries are really 2800mAh.
Lets assume thought that Seidio has higher capacity/gram batteries. This will be proven when it gets tested by d0ugie.

ram130 said:
Well so far its been 1hr 32min since I turned it on. I made 5min call and sen a few texts. I'm 94% now and this is what battery use is showing:
Voice calls 39%
Display 29%
Cell standby 7%
Android system 6%
Phone idle 6%
wifi 4%
Gallery 3% (WEIRD, have not went in there)
Android OS 3%
Google 2%
Current temp: 86.9*
Voltage: 4.0.84v
I took some pictures of it. Please note, to take pics I had to plug in via usb, using the SDK.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'd contact tech support because Doug is probably right. You have to have either a hardware or software problem that is causing your phone to drain your battery (like GPS is always on, even though it shows it is off).

ram130 said:
Well so far its been 1hr 32min since I turned it on. I made 5min call and sen a few texts. I'm 94% now and this is what battery use is showing:
Voice calls 39%
Display 29%
Cell standby 7%
Android system 6%
Phone idle 6%
wifi 4%
Gallery 3% (WEIRD, have not went in there)
Android OS 3%
Google 2%
Current temp: 86.9*
Voltage: 4.0.84v
I took some pictures of it. Please note, to take pics I had to plug in via usb, using the SDK.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is Gallery is activated every time you look up contacts and used for the background?
I think you have your phone searching for signal all time. Go into the wireless settings and click the Only use 2g networks. Only turn it on manually when you want to use 3g.
Tell us how your battery is after that. I suspect you spend some time in areas where the phone is boosting power to get a good signal and its causing battery loss. (BTW, you only get a few hours with the screen on)

Maybe you could try using the phone during a typical day, then posting your battery results after 8+ hours of use... that should give us a better idea of where your drain is coming from, but if it is still inconclusive I would still say you should contact tech support.

Why no smartphones with HUGE batt?

These days smartphones have gotten plenty small to carry normally. so why don't they beef them up with a ginormous batt and make it a selling point?
I think the SGS is the smallest big screened smartphone. If they were to make it Evo sized, double the batt life and sell it as a completely different phone, that would be great! I mean I would think it would be some major bragging right to say "our phone has 200% the batt life of the next best phone".
10 hours of full 3G web browsing/GPS/video playback
70hrs+ of audio playback
on top of all that, maximum batt life deterioration over time will be null because you'll go through MANY fewer recharge cycles.
These phones are all great, but I'm a power user and I'm always fighting my batt. We should be able to have all the bells and whistles blowing at all times.
Thanks for your time/response
Edit: the new iPod has a 3400mah batt. Coupled with the "Peal" which turns the iPod into an iPhone (albeit an ugly one), you basically get an iPhone 4 with double the batt life in a similar sized package...
Edit: I'm dead wrong about the iPod's batt capacity as rajendra82 has pointed out. It was 3.4 watt hour, not 3.4 amp hours. Sorry (for the record, the iPod's batt would be terribly insufficient as a modern phone batt in a smartphone)

eatkabab said:
These days smartphones have gotten plenty small to carry normally. so why don't they beef them up with a ginormous batt and make it a selling point?
I think the SGS is the smallest big screened smartphone. If they were to make it Evo sized, double the batt life and sell it as a completely different phone, that would be great! I mean I would think it would be some major bragging right to say "our phone has 200% the batt life of the next best phone".
10 hours of full 3G web browsing/GPS/video playback
70hrs+ of audio playback
on top of all that, maximum batt life deterioration over time will be null because you'll go through MANY fewer recharge cycles.
These phones are all great, but I'm a power user and I'm always fighting my batt. We should be able to have all the bells and whistles blowing at all times.
Thanks for your time/response
Edit: the new iPod has a 3400mah batt. Coupled with the "Peal" which turns the iPod into an iPhone (albeit an ugly one), you basically get an iPhone 4 with double the batt life in a similar sized package... sigh...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The new iPOD touch has a 3.44 Wh battery, which at 3.7 V translates to 929 mAh. The Samsung Captivate has a 5.55 Wh battery, which at 3.7 V translates to 1500 mAh. Since the battery capacity is directly proportional to the volume, a battery of 3000 mAh will be twice as big as our current battery. The biggest phones today (i.e., the EVO and Droid X) only ship with a 1300 mAh battery. 1500 mAH is plenty for this phone to get through the day. Battery life is typically rated at 1000 cycles, which is 3 years assuming a full day to go from 100% to 0%. You are likely to replace the phone in 3 years any way.

Our phones do have large batteries, and as long as you don't have a bad program, have the screen on super bright, or use it as a hot spot, the battery life is going to be good enough for nearly anyone.
The captivate has a HUGE percent of the volume dedicated to the battery already, without using a non standard (non rectangular prism) battery shape the phone thickness would need to greatly increase and have wasted space.
In simpler terms, when your battery is already good for the market, a thinner phone sells more than a marginal battery lfie increase.

What about weight? Does a bigger battery weigh significantly more?

I would love to have a bigger battery or one of those battery cases like my fiancee has for her iphone. I think the above comments are spot on, but i think what companies dont take into account is how much people use their phones for on a daily basis. I dont know about you, but I use my phone a hell of a lot during the day more so than what constitutes as 'just getting through the day'. If im lucky enough to make it through till the end of the day its skirting on the red. A backup battery would be awesome to have!

rajendra82 said:
The new iPOD touch has a 3.44 Wh battery, which at 3.7 V translates to 929 mAh.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry, I just realized that. I must have missed the details about the ipod power.
I understand that the captivate technically has the "best" battery, but I do not agree that it will last through the day. I'm using my phone regularly to look up information, text, Gtalk, and make many calls. The phone is dead by the time I get home around 6pm (days start around 7:30am).
the iPad has a "10 hour batt life". My sister has her iPad lying around the house but she and I are much more often on our phones, so why don't our phones have a 10 hour batt life? I think its kinda difficult to use the ipad for 10 hours in a single day seeing that people usually work too. My phone is used for productive purposes usually, so it is very easy to drain it in the 4.5hrs it lasts on any day (not to mention difficult to get through an 8hr plane ride and still have juice to find your way to the hotel when you land). Last I checked, a day was at least 8 hours, not 4.5.
I also realize that they would have to ditch the rectangle/cube form factor of the batt in order to fill the space of a larger case more efficiently (something the iphone takes advantage of). I have nothing against this (or the added weight) and I don't think any other power user would care either.
At the end of the day, a captivate thats as big and heavy as the Evo is a small compromise if it'll last ALL day long and I believe there is a significant market for Android+10hr batt. Unfortunately, the obvious response to that is that I'm wrong since it doesn't exist. So I guess I'm just a crazy person then
Sigh...
Edit: I forgot to mention Virgin America has solved all flying problems with this nifty little thing called a power receptacle in each trio of seats.

There have been at least 10 different claims in the last 5-10 years from companys saying they've found a way to at least triple battery capacity.
so far none of them have made anything...

Have you ever seen those extended batteries that also replace the back cover? They look awful. It's great that the Captivate is so slim and light.
It's unlikely that enough people need that much power every day for manufacturers to implement a huge battery in every device.

Nevertheless, it would be great to have the option.
Third party batteries that replace the back cover haven't been designed by the manufacturer to take advantage of all the space available, they're just made afterwards for the (admittedly few) people who need to stay more than 12hrs without a power source.
If a manufacturer specifically made a phone to accomodate a larger battery, the uglyness+volume/duration ratio would be much better.
Imagine a qwerty slider with a large battery instead of the keyboard: you could live with the additional volume and you could go on for two full days without a powersource.
Personally I wouldn't ever make it without a car charger, I keep a spare battery around in case I need it and even carry a retractable microUSB as a key holder (I use my phone as a music player, the battery drains FAST).
I'm ok with that but a large capacity batt. would let me not have to care about how much juice I have left all the time, wich would be great.

eatkabab said:
At the end of the day, a captivate thats as big and heavy as the Evo is a small compromise if it'll last ALL day long and I believe there is a significant market for Android+10hr batt. Unfortunately, the obvious response to that is that I'm wrong since it doesn't exist. So I guess I'm just a crazy person then
Sigh...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're not crazy. I think about the smartphone battery problem all the time. It's by far the biggest drawback of a smartphone. Even if you are using it lightly, you still have to charge every night, that is smartphone 101. And yet, if my friend iwth a little feature phone texts me all day, and I text them back all day, there phone... is fine. They can bascially run it all day for three days before needing to charge when it's new. My Captivate (or any other smartphone)... constantly having the screen on? It would be begging for battery after hours. Now of course, we have vastly better batteries than the feature phone, it's just the smartphone is doing significantly more. But still, yes, there should be a way, possibly with non-rectangular batteries, to significantly (at least double) battery life at a not massive cost to form factor and size. And yes, I'm sure there is a market here as well.

Seido is in the development process for a 3200mA battery for the cappy. Won't be long before you can actually see what it looks like on their website
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

This may be about the captivate battery life but I think some of u are crazy. I run the hybrid r3 rom on my phone and I use it for music; GPS; internet and everything else that is normal and my battery is garbage. I'm sorry but when I buy a phone it should not be dead by like 3 pm
Sent from my vibrant hybrid using XDA App

Bigger battery means more weight. Some manufacturers get a little more power out of the same physical size, but if you really want to double the battery, you double the size and double the weight.
Since the phones have no extra room inside, you wind up with a bigger phone.
All manufacturers are trying to balance size, weight and power. It is no coincidence that all the smartphones have near the same size battery.

ColbyRyptos said:
This may be about the captivate battery life but I think some of u are crazy. I run the hybrid r3 rom on my phone and I use it for music; GPS; internet and everything else that is normal and my battery is garbage. I'm sorry but when I buy a phone it should not be dead by like 3 pm
Sent from my vibrant hybrid using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This post pretty much leads me to believe more is going on than you're saying. With hybrid r3 I was getting two days with heavy usage, also gps isn't functional on that rom, so claiming to use it seems to be misinformed at best
Sent from my Samsung SGH-i897

beazie0885 said:
Seido is in the development process for a 3200mA battery for the cappy. Won't be long before you can actually see what it looks like on their website
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Seido might make some great batteries, but if the batt for the captivate is ANYTHING like the batt for the galaxy S, its absolutely retarded and WAY too big to be practical. They basically just extended the batt brick and extended the casing with it. With the same batt cover, they could have added a whole nother batt right next to the extended batt cuz of all the wasted space.
Not a viable solution IMO. A factory made phone that has a HUGE batt would be marginally larger than the current captivate because they can take advantage of a non-traditional form factor and all the space inside.

eatkabab said:
Seido might make some great batteries, but if the batt for the captivate is ANYTHING like the batt for the galaxy S, its absolutely retarded and WAY too big to be practical. They basically just extended the batt brick and extended the casing with it. With the same batt cover, they could have added a whole nother batt right next to the extended batt cuz of all the wasted space.
Not a viable solution IMO. A factory made phone that has a HUGE batt would be marginally larger than the current captivate because they can take advantage of a non-traditional form factor and all the space inside.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Our Captivate doesn't have any extra space, and even the Droid X has a battery of the same size. I am just not seeing the extra space for bigger battery. There is also the weight issue.
Now if maybe the new Dell Streak will give you a monster battery in that big thing.

i agree that a phone with a super battery pack would be nice. me and my friends would always talk about if we could make our own phones what we would want and i always said something that would give me nice battery life so the idea i came up with was this
by default most phones come with a 1500 mah battery
but why not add a non traditional form factor to the rest of the case adding battery to and around the phone like in the area around the camera in the front of the phone around the side of the phone kinda like some of this battery jackets we see coming out for the iphone 4
i think it would add maybe just a built more bulk to the phone i'm still using a tilt so i'm used to carryin a bulky phone
i've always been interested in seeing super cap or ultra cap tech being put into a smartphone figuring if we can't go all day with our battery at least let us be able to get a full charge with in a few minutes ya know
i see ultra and super cap tech starting to be put in remotes were you can charge it in 1 minute to 5 minutes and not have to charge it for two weeks that kinda tech in a cell would be lovely

I, for one, would give up the cool looking indent in the back of the captivate (where the metal cover is) if they would fill that space with battery. It wouldn't increase the size of the phone (much), wouldn't make it bulgy, and I could see it giving at least 50% better battery life.
Even if the phone was blobby, plenty of people are buying Droid phones, and those things are frikin' mon calamari cruisers.

alphadog00 said:
Our Captivate doesn't have any extra space, and even the Droid X has a battery of the same size. I am just not seeing the extra space for bigger battery. There is also the weight issue.
Now if maybe the new Dell Streak will give you a monster battery in that big thing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
obviously they would have to make the phone a tad thicker and its already so light weight that adding double the batt weight would still keep it weighing less than an Evo

the Samsung Captivate battery is pretty beefy if you ask me, I don't know how they would fit a processor and other components in the phone if they got a bigger battery

Mugen Power batteries (1800mAh and 3600mAh) for MyTouch 4G Slide?

Mugen Power just released 1800mAh and 3600mAh (this one I'm interested in) for MyTouch 4G Slide. I just check them on their Facebook page and I'm quite interested in the performance...
http://www.facebook.com/mugenpowerbatteries
Mugen Power 1800mAh battery
Mugen Power 3600mAh battery

Yeah I was suprise there wasn't a post about this earlier, I am interested in picking up one too but not sure which one I would go with...
Sent from my MyTouch 4G Slide using XDA App

I love Mugen Power batteries. I bought one for my G1 and the words "battery life" was just something other people complained about when flashing a new ROM and not something i ever thought about again until I bought the MT4GS. I'm definitely picking up one or both of these. I can't tell if the 3600 is going to be offered in black though. I may contact them and ask. I can tell you with that 3600 you could go camping in the mountains for a few days and not worry about you phone dying...very handy trip battery
Sent from my myTouch_4G_Slide using xda premium

My 1900 anker battery was much cheeper and it lasts really long
Sent from my myTouch_4G_Slide using XDA App

siani_8 please do let us know whether they will offer a blank door for the 3600 battery when they reply to your message.

siani_8 said:
I love Mugen Power batteries. I bought one for my G1 and the words "battery life" was just something other people complained about when flashing a new ROM and not something i ever thought about again until I bought the MT4GS. I'm definitely picking up one or both of these. I can't tell if the 3600 is going to be offered in black though. I may contact them and ask. I can tell you with that 3600 you could go camping in the mountains for a few days and not worry about you phone dying...very handy trip battery
Sent from my myTouch_4G_Slide using xda premium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Honestly I was very disappointed with HTC over the stock battery issues. Very, very limited battery life but more importantly, the heat issue. There were a few times where I was seriously evaluating whether I needed to put the phone down and give my hands a chance to cool off before I started getting mild burns. It was in my hands for a while there almost 20-something hours a day for days on end. I wouldn't worry about it starting a fire or anything like that, but that long-term exposure to the heat against my skin was becoming a consideration.
This was before, and the reason I waited so long on, getting a case. The idea of trapping more heat against the phone to me was my immediate evaluation and dismissal of the thought.
The second generation snapdragon processors had a fatal flaw. They were overly subject to heat stresses that just burned up the chip, because of what the chip was. Third generation snapdragon processors are in our phones, and I just couldn't pass this device up.
The more I thought about the heat issue, the more I decided that it was the battery that was the problem. HTC brought us an insane piece of hardware, but they aren't a battery manufacturing company and nothing else. I suppose the idea that they just got a battery in it to get the hardware out the door is a concession to getting the actual device itself to the specs it is. The heat issue makes it not okay though.
I'd forgive a crappy battery out of the box, but not one that directly damages and shortens the lifespan of the device it's in. Heat is your enemy, especially so when the phone itself is that hot.
Along comes a thread on the anker battery, and a decent amount of people who chime in or get and love this battery. I looked one up and found it for $3 at amazon - how could I not get it when an HTC replacement battery is $35-$40 for less then 1600...the anker is a 1900.
I absolutely love the anker battery, it's completely changed the experience. I no longer walk out the door and wonder if i'm going to run out of power, and I have two energizer 4000 usb-battery packs I can take with me.
The heat issue...gone like it never existed. My phone is no longer destroying itself just to live. I can do whatever I want on the phone for hours on end and not really give much consideration to what my battery is like until towards the end of it. With the stock battery, I was evaluating my next possible power sources before i'd leave a place.
...solving the heat issue let me consider cases, and another negative about a case was how often I was swapping out my MicroSD card for a while, there weren't any long periods of time (more then maybe a third of a day) that I didn't swap out a card.
I've since passively seen the name mugen tossed around in XDA, and i'm pretty sure it was considered a quality piece of equipment...just in a general non-specific sense. This thread kinda confirms that impression a bit with the opportunity to answer the question.
If the 3600 is legit, and I didn't click the link I don't have the time to look now, i'd love to know about it. I have some other things i'd like to get for this phone before a new battery would be a worthwhile consideration, but if it's really a good 3600 battery then that time would come pretty quickly, and it would honestly be more about protecting the investment in the hardware i've purchased, then getting extra run time.
If the battery runs hot, i'm not interested, so i'd appreciate if those who are going to jump on either of these to make a note of that, and maybe pass it along?
I'd really love to have this battery in my phone, if it's as good as i'm thinking/wishing it could be.
I'd like to say thank you to the people who are gonna jump on this and be able to tell us about it, people will definitely be paying attention.

duckied said:
siani_8 please do let us know whether they will offer a blank door for the 3600 battery when they reply to your message.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The black door option is right on their page. Just select the drop down box.

Techlvr said:
The black door option is right on their page. Just select the drop down box.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The drop down option wasn't there yesterday because I was looking for it but they added it, probably after I contacted them because they got back to me last night and said it is available.
They also added the Mytouch 4G Slide to the list of phones on their site with nothing available yet two weeks ago after I contacted them the second time. I had been waiting for them to add product listing since then.

Yep the option wasn't not there yesterday, only thing now is they aren't in stock till Oct. 28 and shipping from China is another 2 weeks which total a month before it will be ship to our doors. Fudge cake -_-"
Sent from my MyTouch 4G Slide using XDA App

Thats alot for a battery... A hundred dollar for 3600 and almost 50 for 1800....
Anker is 20 dollars for 1900.
Sent from my Senseless Doubleshot using XDA App

m0j09987 said:
Thats alot for a battery... A hundred dollar for 3600 and almost 50 for 1800....
Anker is 20 dollars for 1900.
Sent from my Senseless Doubleshot using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're right it is a lot. However, from experience, I can tell you that I bought the Mugen Power slim extended and the extended with battery door (2600 mah I think) over three years ago for my G1 and both hold just as long of a charge today as the day I bought them. Also, the 2600 mah lasts around 3 days for me. Seriously, while overclocking and flashing new ROMs I never once thought "Is this ROM going to have good battery?" I just never thought about that stuff anymore.
Also, I'm a firm believer in "you get what you pay for" and I already found enough stories floating around the forums that put the idea in my head that those Anker batteries MIGHT be 1700 mah...but yeah that's more than the OEM so it is still an increase and can be considered a great deal still. I can't tell you how long Anker batteries will last because I've never owned one myself but two of those Anker batteries and a charger for less money than a lower capacity OEM almost sounds too good to be true and I'd like so see some legitimate tests on how much extra juice they are providing and for how many charges will they continue to provide it.
The plus sides for Anker: If you bought the two pack with charger then you can always have a backup and the price really is right and I did hear there is a Warranty. There are also plenty more positive stories for Anker than negative ones.
I've never owned an Anker battery so I'm not bashing it for those who have bought it and would like to buy it. You are saving a lot of money if you decide to go that route. Personally though, I just bought a $500.00 phone and I'm a little skeptical to stick in a battery that costs the same amount as a pack of AA's from Wal-Mart. So for my personal piece of mind I'd rather spend a little more on a battery that I've come to trust from previous experience.
That said, I just bought the Mugen Power 1800 (two weeks for delivery) and I'll probably pick up the 3600 as well because I do a lot of camping and I like the security of a long lasting charge on trip for a few days or more.
BTW does Anker have a website or do they just sell batteries through ebay and Amazon? I looked but I didn't see one. If anyone can point me to their site, I'd appreciate it. I was mainly curious about their Warranty. Where do you send it if the batties do go bad especially if you bought them on Amazon or ebay or something? *Edit* I just found their website. It was iAnker.com

I am the same, at first seems like an awesome battery but idk how long itll keep holding that much of a charge, anyone with insight to that?

I received my Mugen Power 1800mah. I'm on the first full charge now during a recommended 5 charge break-in period. This battery isn't rated much higher than stock so I'm really not expecting a miracle out of this one. I'm just hoping to get some more out of my day without a charge. When it's time for miracles, I'm pulling the trigger on the 3600mah.
That said, I can tell you that at least the battery is a perfect fit for the phone and there was no shoving or forcing to get it in.

siani_8, thanks for the update on the battery - keep us posted ( I know you will ) on how it goes for you.
I'm glad to hear it's a great fit, but i'd honestly expect nothing less from a company whose name oozes quality like Mugen.
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this thread to see what comes from this.
Thanks!

NEW MUGEN POWER BATTERY INITIAL CHARGING INSTRUCTIONS
1. CHARGE BATTERY FOR 8-12 HOURS
For the first 4-5 charges, please charge the battery in the device for 8-12 hours using the main power adapter and with device turned on (Important: For the first 4-5 charges You Should charge the battery for 8-12 hours, even if your phone is showing that it is fully charged already!).
2. USE DEVICE AS NORMAL
After each charge, please use the device as normal, until device tells you the battery is very low, then recharge.
3. REPEAT 4-5 TIMES
Repeat this process for 4-5 times.
After that you can recharge the battery whenever is suitable for You, and just until your device is showing it is fully charged. Important: NEVER drain the battery completely to 0%.
---------- Post added at 08:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:37 PM ----------
I tried to follow the initial charging instructings as best I could for the first 4 days of use. I took the phone off charge at 6:30 A.M. in the morning and had it back on by 6:30 P.M. (unless noted otherwise) to give it the full recommended 12 hours of charge.
I have no real controlled test for the Mugen Power 1800mah battery; however, I'm going to give a rundown by day of my experience so far with this battery.
I am currently using the Bulletproof ROM and stock Kernel.
For all days so far, the phone has been on the entire time unless specically noted. Also wi-fi, wifi calling, GPS, and bluetooth were enabled the entire time and power saving features remained unchecked in the settings. Screen brightness stayed at setting 1 of 3. My homescreens currently include the Weather widget, Friendstream widget, and Calender Widget.
Day 1: During day 1 of usage, I sent frequent texts to my girlfriend during the day, made a couple of short phone calls, read the news in the morning and checked my email occasionally as well as the XDA Forums. I had a stop on the way home and barely made it to the charger at 6:30.. the phone actually shut down a minute before I got it on charge so on day 1 I got 1 minute shy of 12 hours.
Day 2: The usage on day 2 was about the same as day 1 except I had to turn the brightness up all the way and use the phone heavily for about 15 minutes or so when I got home to drain the battery to 2% and put it back on charge. Again, around 12 hours of my normal usage is fair assesment of day 2.
Day 3: When I woke in the morning I booted into recovery and and reset battery stats. When I rebooted it was showing 93% *shrug* I also dropped my phone during the day and the battery fell out..ooops. Anyway, the phone life seemed to be doing a little better on the third day so I started using it more heavily. I was checking my email frequently, sending frequent texts, checking the XDA forums a lot, updated about 6 apps, checked the news app more than a few times. When I got home at 6:00 I had turn the brightness all the way up and use the phone for about 20 minutes straight to kill it to 2% and get it back on charge for 12 hours.
Day 4: I used the phone as much as I wanted to on the 4th day. I still texted as I usually would, made a couple short calls, checked the news and XDA frequently, took some pictures read the news - all standard stuff. It was Friday and I wasn't worried about getting it on charge by 6:30 so I continued to use it as normal and I made it to 8:30 before it dropped to 2%. Day 4 was 14 hours of continued usage.
I expect under the conditions of normal use I won't get much more than Day 4. I suppose if I wanted to conserve and enable power saving settings, turned off GPS during the day and only enabled bluetooth when I knew I was getting in the car then I might be able to sqeeeze out more. Of course if I played a video game on it I'm sure I'd get a whole lot less.
I am not unpleased with the results of the battery and is probably about what I expected for my my normal usage.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=669497
This might help in general...link that should have made it's way here sooner. XDA review of li-ion batteries and care for them.

Just a follow up on my Experience with the Mugen 1800mah
I ran the phone yesterday with all the same criteria as my previous posts for Days 1-4 except I kept GPS and Bluetooth off all day. After 24 hours the phone was at 16% and then I put it back on charge. I was reading the XDA forums a lot yesterday, texted moderately, read news, made a few calls, took a couple of pictures and checked my email frequently. I thought that was worth sharing. Everyone uses their phones differently so individual results may vary across all batteries and phones
Obviously, I wasn't awake for 24 hours. The phone was in hibernation for 8 hours while I slept.
I do know I couldn't make it half a day on stock with my usage, so I'm pleased so far with my second phone using Mugen Power.

I was bored and decided to post some screen shots of my battery usage today on the Mugen Power 1800mah. Screen brightness was at level 1 of 3, GPS and Bluetooth off all day today. I'm still on Bulletproof ROM with Stock Kernel. 13 and half hours of pretty good use today and I'm still at 17%. BTW I just order the Mugen Power 3600mah so I can give that whirl too but I'm kind of attached to my Trident Case now so I'll probably only use that battery on long trips. We shall see. Sorry the pictures are so big!!
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}

just ordered one! hope its worth it!

torint said:
just ordered one! hope its worth it!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I hope it is too! Mugen makes a quality battery and you will get more life than stock, without a doubt.
However, it should be noted that users of the Anker Battery 1900mah are reporting longer runtimes than my battery for a cheaper price. Please keep that in mind before purchasing. I've seen a couple users stating 24 hours of good use.
I don't own that battery so I'm just trying to give a detailed representation of my real world useage on the Mugen 1800mah. In my previous screenshots, it says the display was on for 4 hours total. I was using it quite a bit today, on various apps so I'm not sure why only XDA shows up in the usage. I messaged quite a bit too but I'm not sure what that shows up as. Does that fall under Dialer usage I wonder?

Batteries - "Settling", without choosing the worst of the worst?

I have a battery scenario that I'd like some input on, and hopefully I'm coming at this from an angle that is not entirely repetitive / redundant / already addressed ad nauseum.
My girlfriend and I lucked out, and our phones (mine a Sensation and hers an EVO 3D) use the same cells. We're not big on cable-charging our phones, and tend to just charge & swap in fresh batteries instead. We've bought countless "$2.50 ebay specials", and as you might expect, we've never been blown away by them. So, after reading up on this forum, I decided to do the label-removal-check, and indeed, a lot of our batteries are 1000mAh lipo packs inside a package that claims 1800mAh etc.
Here's where my question becomes NOT just another "choose the best battery" thread.
We're heading out next month for travels that may leave us without the ability to charge batteries/phones for weeks. We've got a few other external power solutions going on, but at the lowest level, I'd like to have a sizable stock of phone batteries (~10 or so) on hand. And while I'd love for those 10 cells to be Anker cells, our budget doesn't have space for that kind of expense. I'm grabbing an Anker for my day-to-day use back in reality, but for this trip, we need a handful of markedly less expensive cells.
What I'm looking for, are inexpensive cells, that don't completely suck.
I'd like a balance of cost and energy storage. Dollar per mAh, the $2.50 fake eBay cells are actually the best deal (when you consider a true capacity of 1000mAh for $2.50 versus 1900mAh for $15+). But I'm hoping that there's something that can reliably hit closer to the 1500mAh mark, without octupling the price. In my mind, $5 for 1500mAh would be more attractive than $2.50 for 1000mAh, or $15 for 1900mAh. Does anyone know of a cell / seller / brand / store that might be worth looking into?

Buy power banks they hold like 5000mah each which gives you 3-4 charges and then you can recharge the power bank or either for travelling get those cheap battery you bough before but make sure to get a ton of em youll run out of juice quickly..
Sent From My Sexy Sensation Running Aokp.

shahkam said:
Buy power banks they hold like 5000mah each which gives you 3-4 charges and then you can recharge the power bank or either for travelling get those cheap battery you bough before but make sure to get a ton of em youll run out of juice quickly.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yep, that's an awesome suggestion. That's already one of the external solutions I have planned. We've got a number of 18650-powered power banks that will hold out in a pinch. Choosing a battery cell for the phones is still a task I'm interested in doing intelligently though.
So.... with that said, I've decided to undertake a "Sensation Battery Comparison Research Project" (SBCRP) hehehe It occurred to me that it would be nice to take the guesswork out of battery comparisons. "Got 7 hours with moderate usage" can be a tough qualitative statement to compare, especially when everyone's idea of light and heavy usage is different. It occurred to me that I actually have a capacity metering device designed for measuring cell discharge. I had never used it, because in its stock configuration it only works for 2S or greater lithium ion packs. The device requires an external power supply in order to be able to work with single lithium ion cells. So last night I grabbed the soldering iron, and finally added one. Now I'm good to go with testing single lithium ion cells
Long story short, it's essentially a recording voltage and amperage meter, that discharges a cell and keeps track of the Ah in the process. The load (pictured on the right) is a chasis-mount 10 Ohm resistor soldered to the output leads of the capacity metering device. That results in a relatively slow discharge of around 300 to 400mA. The resistor (test load) is submerged in water for cooling purposes (it gets a little warm to the touch if just left out in open air).
Photo of setup: http://forum.xda-developers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1178644&stc=1&d=1341500289
TEST DATA:
I ran the first test last night. I'll keep chugging through the cells I have and adding them here. Or if people think this is useful data, I can create its own thread.
EDIT: Created its own thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=28334916#post28334916

To be honest its just not legit that a 2.50$ battery would have 1800mah i mean the stock ones cost more its just obvious troll there.
What you could do : its a little bit expansive but it worth it get an anker battery and 2 power banks along whit your gold battery's if you do light usage you should get trough 2 weeks no problem perhaps ..
Sent From My Sexy Sensation Running Aokp.

shahkam said:
To be honest its just not legit that a 2.50$ battery would have 1800mah i mean the stock ones cost more its just obvious troll there.
What you could do : its a little bit expansive but it worth it get an anker battery and 2 power banks along whit your gold battery's if you do light usage you should get trough 2 weeks no problem perhaps ..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I know. And we really shouldn't fault the cheapo batteries, it's not their fault These are just Lipo cells, and they cost what they cost. If you take a look at the energy density (and cost) of lipo cells used in hobby fields, then you'll quickly realize that $2.50 for a 1000mAh cell, of the size used in these packs, is actually a pretty remarkable value (even more remarkable when you consider the fact that these packs also have some circuitry in them).
I like your suggestion, and it echos much of what the plan was. But I'm still in the position of wanting to order some more cells. They're small and light and I'd still like to have 10 or so of them on hand to get us through 4 or 5 days without having to turn to the power bank.
Do you think other people would be interested in the kind of real-world discharge measurements I was doing above? Because if so, I'll put them in a new on-topic thread, and keep uploading photos/data after each battery I test. If not, I'll just keep the data here on paper.
Circling back to my original question, does anyone have a sense as to which cells might not be complete garbage? To make it simpler, I put together a collage of each (different) cell that came in under $10 shipped on eBay. I omitted a couple options that had watermarks on their photos (didn't want to give any sellers any undue publicity). But these seem like basically the selection of cells that are $3 to $10 shipped.

Honestly people wouldn't mind such an informative thread but I can assure you unless your not a battery fanatics it won't pick peoples interest I'm not trying to be mean here
But as I said you've got plenty of good information up there so why not make thread and perhaps it generates some more "thanks"
Sent From My Sexy Sensation Running Aokp.

Extended Life Battery tempts me:) (a.k.a. extended battery discussion thread)

So I was surfing the intraweb last night and came across http://www.mugen-power-batteries.co...galaxy-s-relay-4g-t699-with-battery-door.html. Very tempting, especially considering that according to Mugen it has NFC. What do y'all think? Should I?
Sent from my SGH-T699 using xda-developers app

uuh... the relay is already quite thick, with that battery it will be huge... i personally wouldn't, but it's a matter of personal taste

I had an extended battery on my Doubleshot before this - the bulk didn't really bother me. Maybe I'm strange but I didn't mind. Especially with the battery life I got.
Sent from my SGH-T699 using xda-developers app

i has extended batteries for my G1 one back then. i used them when i took the device with me geocaching. I had two of them and they made the device stay up longer than i ever did
downside with the bulky back covers is, that the device won't fit into any pouches no more. and, of course cases no longer fit either.
but once you're used to the shape - imho - the added thickness is no longer disturbing.

onebornoflight said:
So I was surfing the intraweb last night and came across http://www.mugen-power-batteries.co...galaxy-s-relay-4g-t699-with-battery-door.html. Very tempting, especially considering that according to Mugen it has NFC. What do y'all think? Should I?
Sent from my SGH-T699 using xda-developers app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can go for this solution....1/5th of Mugen's price:
http://www.hyperionea.com/product/hyperion-samsung-galaxy-s-relay-sgh-t699-2-x-battery-charger/

I had purchased a EZO high capacity battery with cover from Amazon--the same day I ordered the phone. That was months ago and I see the battery is no longer available on the site.
That's a shame, because the package was reasonably priced, the cover fits well, and the battery works as promised.
The device can run about ten consecutive hours for me running CM9 without any CPU profiles and with the governour set to interactive.
If I'm going to be away from a charger for a long time, I've found that setting the device to powersave is tolerable for most applications and the battery goes from good to ridiculous...
The additional bulk will turn off some buyers; however, I have found that it makes sliding the keyboard open much easier...
If you can find an EZO battery and you don't mind the extra bulk, I recommend one.

orange808 said:
I had purchased a EZO high capacity battery with cover from Amazon--the same day I ordered the phone. That was months ago and I see the battery is no longer available on the site.
That's a shame, because the package was reasonably priced, the cover fits well, and the battery works as promised.
The device can run about ten consecutive hours for me running CM9 without any CPU profiles and with the governour set to interactive.
If I'm going to be away from a charger for a long time, I've found that setting the device to powersave is tolerable for most applications and the battery goes from good to ridiculous...
The additional bulk will turn off some buyers; however, I have found that it makes sliding the keyboard open much easier...
If you can find an EZO battery and you don't mind the extra bulk, I recommend one.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
http://www.amazon.com/EZOPower-Capacity-Extended-Replacement-SGH-T699/dp/B00AQRVYXY - this one?
Does it have NFC? I don't see it anywhere on the page.

janejunx said:
http://www.amazon.com/EZOPower-Capacity-Extended-Replacement-SGH-T699/dp/B00AQRVYXY - this one?
Does it have NFC? I don't see it anywhere on the page.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nope. No NFC.

I've had my Relay 4G about a month and a half now, and am already looking at getting an extended battery. I find myself charging it a few times a day - sometimes I'll only get maybe 3 hours before it's "critically low". Yes, I do use it a ton - it's currently my main computer, since I rarely have access to my parents' laptop and my desktop, whose case+mobo+cpu I recently sent to the recycle bin, bit the dust over a year ago. Also I have unlimited unthrottled 4G on T-Mobile (and used well over 10-12GB last month, & this (billing) month am currently at 12.21GB since April 28.
I've seen the Mugen 4600mAh battery with NFC online around $90 (way too rich for my blood), and the EZOPower 4100mAh (no NFC) for around $17-23 or so at Amazon or NewEgg, among other places. I was originally wary of the cheap price on the EZO, but if the huge price difference is due to NFC and not being a cheaply made battery, I'd want the EZO, possibly 2. I don't use the NFC hardly at all, and I suppose if I really need it sometime I could pop the original stock battery back in for the occasion.
So any reason for me to NOT get the EZOPower 4100mAh? If I get 2, I'll probably also want an external charging solution so I can charge one while using the other. Also is there a hardshell case (with a built-in stand) available that fits the phone with the larger battery door? BTW unavailability of those two things won't be dealbreakers for me getting the battery. I had an extended battery for my G1, and that phone finally bit the dust after ~4+ years. (I wonder if my SGH-T699 will last that long…)

would somebody care to explain to be why nfc is dependand on the battery?
the batteries have just the same 4 connectors as any other cell battery i always had in my hands.
or are they made of materials that don't shield the nfc waves passing though?

nfc antenna is in the battery casing. NFC antennas go for about $5 on ebay, if you figured out which two connectors go to the nfc you could probably set up your own if your battery doesn't support it.
Sent from my SGH-T699 using xda premium

Can anyone confirm whether the Relay accurately reports on the extended batteries? I'm currently using a patched Droid 3, but I'm starting to find its limitations too restrictive, and I'm thinking of plonking down for a Relay.

EZO battery
orange808 said:
I had purchased a EZO high capacity battery with cover from Amazon--the same day I ordered the phone. That was months ago and I see the battery is no longer available on the site.
That's a shame, because the package was reasonably priced, the cover fits well, and the battery works as promised.
The device can run about ten consecutive hours for me running CM9 without any CPU profiles and with the governour set to interactive.
If I'm going to be away from a charger for a long time, I've found that setting the device to powersave is tolerable for most applications and the battery goes from good to ridiculous...
The additional bulk will turn off some buyers; however, I have found that it makes sliding the keyboard open much easier...
If you can find an EZO battery and you don't mind the extra bulk, I recommend one.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I also picked up two EZO batteries. They have a well made cover and last for twice what stock does. Unfortunately it didn't have a NFC antenna and both have now swollen up to the point they no longer fit. While I had left them plugged in after full charge, they seem to stay warm and not tolerate it well. Can't say how well they could have lasted if better cared for, but abuse or overcharging seems to effect them quickly.
Does the mugen or other brands also have issues? If anyone else have suggestions.
---------- Post added at 11:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:08 PM ----------
5318008 said:
Can anyone confirm whether the Relay accurately reports on the extended batteries? I'm currently using a patched Droid 3, but I'm starting to find its limitations too restrictive, and I'm thinking of plonking down for a Relay.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, it just displays a percentage. It at least seems accurate while logging with Juice Defender's graph, it would track down at fairly consistent rate until charged or out of power. As for swapping over to a Relay, It's about as well supported as any slider out right now. I haven't been disappointed.

ezo
the EZObattery rocks. For $19 (I got mine on ebay) I get 2 days and a few hours into the 3rd before needing a charge.
I have the same issue kilr00y mentioned about it not fitting into pouches or cases except I found now that the phone is harder to flip open and safely hold at the same time while doing 90 other things at once which is when I always need to use the phone. I keep an aftermarket case on the front screen part but can't find an extended back case. I made my own from a tube of black silicone but would love to hear it if anyone finds another option. I don't mind if the phone turns into 1988 brick style size so long as the battery lasts and I don't crack the screen again.

I was looking at extended batteries and if I'm not mistaken, there seems to be a genuine extended battery that should work with this phone. Just would need an extended battery cover. Battery model is: EB-L1K6ULZ (Link)

rudias said:
I was looking at extended batteries and if I'm not mistaken, there seems to be a genuine extended battery that should work with this phone. Just would need an extended battery cover. Battery model is: EB-L1K6ULZ (Link)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It looks good. Be aware that most "extended" battery will not last long... In particular when they have a lower voltage than the original battery. Lot of battery with higher mAh run at 3.7V instead of 3.8V this make it last shorter than the original.

I've had 2 of the EZOPower 4100mAh batteries, and am experiencing the same problem that stonefoz mentioned about the batteries swelling. In my case, for example, the current one has gotten to where the cover will just spontaneously pop off, and the battery will dislodge, forcing the phone to lose power. Also, regarding his "staying warm" comment - sometimes when I was doing something extensive on the phone, it'd sometimes get so hot, especially the keyboard area, that I could barely hold it, and that concerns me some.
I believe the second one has lasted longer than my first, though. It's not quite as bad now as my first was when I replaced it. I bought my first one May 18, 2013, and my second one September 18, 2013, 4 months later. It's lasted till now, May 7, 2014, 7 and a half months later, but it's about time to replace it.
It looks like it's no longer available, but I was thinking I should try a different one anyway.
One option is this 4600 mAh Mugen battery for about $90, and another is this 5000 mAh MPJ battery for about $35. The MPJ does say it's only 3.7 volts, which according to scaltro could be a concern with longevity per charge.
I definitely would like better battery life. I've noticed that playing FarmVille 2: Country Escape is quite a drain - I'd go from full battery to getting the low battery warning after only something like 2 to 3 hours or so, even with the EZO battery. Earlier, I popped in the factory Samsung battery, topped off its charge, then decided to test battery life playing FV2. I also turned on bluetooth (and sent the sounds to an external speaker), cranked the screen brightness all the way up, and turned off power saver mode, in an attempt to get a "worst-case scenario". I tried turning on WiFi (we have a hotspot here now) but it wouldn't connect to the game server, so I just went through my unlimited+unthrottled 4G.
The results:
2:45am - battery full, unplugged
4:15am - battery 22% (I checked it a few times along the way periodically, but neglected to note the times)
4:23am - battery 14%, had just gotten the battery low popup warning
4:33am - battery 5%, battery critically low popup warning
4:35am - battery 3%, then I went and plugged it in.
So, it lasted only about an hour and 50 minutes from full to 3% remaining. I'm hoping a good battery would be able to go all day and all night and into the next day with similarly-intensive use. (No I wouldn't be playing games the entire time of course!)
Personally, if the $35 MPJ battery would be good enough, and significantly better than the EZO, I'd prefer to go for that one.
I'm wondering, though, if the $90 Mugen is a huge leap up in quality, though (disregarding the NFC for now which I haven't had to use)? It's a bit rich for my blood to drop all at once on a battery for a phone ... BUT, their website tells me they accept returns up to a year later (and I've gone through TWO EZOs in that time), which gives me some hope. If, overall, I'd be spending less by getting one Mugen and it outlasting 4 or 5 EZOs (if they were still available), I'd get that.
On a side note, it'll be a while before I can afford to replace my phone, but when I do, I'd really like a good QWERTY keyboard. I see that very few phones come with them now, though, and the ones that are are near the bottom of the barrel spec-wise. I'm thinking I'll need to get an external compact bluetooth or USB keyboard with my next phone, and expand my options for the phone itself. Ideally I'd like to get one that I can put in a flip case, with the phone in the other side of it, and close it when I'm not using it. (Although, there is the concern with getting the phone out quickly to answer calls, although I maybe only talk 25-50 minutes a month or so.) Any suggestions on what to look for in the case/keyboard department, for example? Chances are it won't be till 2015 at the earliest (and my wallet hopes my Galaxy S Relay 4G will last through 2016 or so unless it dies or something else goes seriously wrong) before I get a new phone, but I like to start my search early. When I do get one, I'm hoping it'll last at least 4-5 years, and maybe stretch it to 7-10 if I'm pressed for cash then.

My high capacity EZO battery eventually bloated and swelled up--after a year. I replaced it with a Mugen battery. Both came with new back covers and make the device about as chunky as a Sidekick II.
My device can run OpenGL applications for about 9 hours straight with the brightness set to 50%. It's about the same for movies. I get decent signal at my house and GPS is disabled when I am not using it. I use Green Power and Greenify to save battery when the device is locked, but that wouldn't affect using the device.
I am on an official Cyanogen nightly, so there's really no battery saving hocus pocus at work here.
Make no mistake, an extended battery will get you about 9 hours of heavy use. I thought I was going to die when I used a stock battery for a week waiting for my new Mugen to replace the old EZO. The device literally couldn't survive one day of use for me.

orange808 said:
My high capacity EZO battery eventually bloated and swelled up--after a year. I replaced it with a Mugen battery. Both came with new back covers and make the device about as chunky as a Sidekick II.
My device can run OpenGL applications for about 9 hours straight with the brightness set to 50%. It's about the same for movies. I get decent signal at my house and GPS is disabled when I am not using it. I use Green Power and Greenify to save battery when the device is locked, but that wouldn't affect using the device.
I am on an official Cyanogen nightly, so there's really no battery saving hocus pocus at work here.
Make no mistake, an extended battery will get you about 9 hours of heavy use. I thought I was going to die when I used a stock battery for a week waiting for my new Mugen to replace the old EZO. The device literally couldn't survive one day of use for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ahh, so your EZO bloated too, just took a little longer than mine did.
Sounds like the Mugen (if that's the one you describe getting 9 hours of heavy use) has relatively decent life. Would you say it's significantly better per charge in that respect than the EZO was when it was good?
Also how is the Mugen for longevity, as in not swelling, etc? If I buy a Mugen, would I over the long term pay the same or less than if I had kept buying EZOs? Paying $90 in one blow seems a bit heavy on the wallet, but I'd do it if I'm getting that much better quality & longevity.

pianoplayer88key said:
Ahh, so your EZO bloated too, just took a little longer than mine did.
Sounds like the Mugen (if that's the one you describe getting 9 hours of heavy use) has relatively decent life. Would you say it's significantly better per charge in that respect than the EZO was when it was good?
Also how is the Mugen for longevity, as in not swelling, etc? If I buy a Mugen, would I over the long term pay the same or less than if I had kept buying EZOs? Paying $90 in one blow seems a bit heavy on the wallet, but I'd do it if I'm getting that much better quality & longevity.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Honestly, I got about the same results with my EZO battery: just over 9 hours of constant heavy use. Other than the fact it swelled up, it worked great. I guess there was a reason it was so cheap...
I had a Mugen battery for my Sidekick 4G before I bought the Relay and it still works great. (I loaned the SK4G to a friend that broke his phone.) My new Mugen hasn't had any problems, but I've only had it a few months.
Combined with TeamApex's Cyanogen and this awesome QWERTY keyboard, my extended batteries have made this phone the most productive and useful device I have ever owned. I can't say enough great things about ApexTmo, the Relay, and extended batteries.