We all have heard all the warnings, and have been told again and again: Let the battery in your portable devices run a full cycle each time to avoid damaging it. Well, firstly, what does this mean? It means that you should charge the battery right up until it’s at 100% (or tells you it’s finished). Then you should use it normally, ignoring the life left in the battery. The final step is to, once the battery has completely depleted, charge it then and only then. This is easy on something such as a MacBook or Nintendo DS – the MacBook will go to sleep when its battery runs down, sending you a message to plug it in, and the DS will just run out of charge and turn off. But what about the iPhone? Yes, you can charge it up to 100% and then use it normally, but when do you decide to plug it back in? At the first warning at 20%? At the second, at 10%? Or do you just let it run down to zero and turn off? The battery warnings tell us to run it right down to zero. But this isn’t practical on an iPhone, or any other phone for that matter. It’s a phone, which means we need it on permanently, or close to it, so that we can be contacted. That is, after all the whole point. So if you let the battery die, you’ll be left with a useless brick of metal and plastic until you can get back to a USB cable and either a computer or a plug socket. So why not start charging it back up once you get the 10% or 20% warnings? Well, according to the ‘label’, that will eventually mangle the battery; “If you don’t let the battery run down completely, you might cause it to never run down past that point again, lowering the life of your battery forever”, they say. They also call that effect ‘battery memory’ or something like that. So does the iPhone battery have a ‘battery memory’? If you plug it in when it gets to 25%, will it only ever go back down to 25%? I don’t know. Maybe Apple have solved this problem somehow. get back to me in the comments below if you know. There’s also another problem with the iPhone. Because it syncs with iTunes rather than just plugging into the wall, there are many times when you want (or need) to sync it when the battery is only down to 50 or 60% – what about those times? Will the battery be obliterated within three weeks? Again, leave a comment if you know the answer.
So that’s about it for this rant on batteries. As you may be able to see, since my last post the blog has gone through a bit of decoration. It’s not quite finished yet, B&Q ran out of the paint I need.