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.
Posts Tagged ‘iTunes’
iPhones and Batteries and Other Things Like That
Saturday, September 12th, 2009Out With A Crash
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
Well, for the first time in the seven months I’ve had my iPod Touch (2nd Generation), it has just had a major crash incident. And by that, I mean that it wouldn’t do anything at all – except charge. I was playing an innocent game of Wild West Pinball, and it suddenly turned off. I thought nothing of it, because it was running low on battery, and I assumed it had just run out. So I fired up the MacBook, and plugged in the iPod. Nothing. All it did was start charging (don’t you just love that little noise it makes when you plug it in?) and showed the dreaded Connect to iTunes screen. The next step in the Plan Of Action was to restore the device from a backup, but when I tried to connect to it in iTunes, it said that it was locked with a passcode – obviously I couldn’t enter the code because the Connect to iTunes screen was there. So I turned it off and on a couple of times, used a different USB cable and even tried a different MacBook, but nothing was working. In the end, I scoured the Internet for a solution. I ended up on some forum or other, which told me that I should put the iPod into DFU mode*. I tried it out, and sure enough, there was my iPod right there in iTunes! I hastily clicked the Restore button so that I could start using it again. The OS had been completely wiped and so I’m currently re-downloading the next version it would allow me to install, 2.2.1 – I don’t have a backup of 3.0 on the MacBook because I usually sync with the iMac. At the moment, the iPod won’t turn on – it doesn’t have an OS, after all – but at least I can see it in iTunes! The downside to restoring it on the laptop is I don’t have all the applications downloaded onto the hard drive, so I’m going to have to get them again from the iPod. I’m also going to have to wait until it has synced all my 260 songs back onto the iPod before I can use it properly again. At least it works, though! Problem solved!
*How to use DFU mode:
- Connect your iPod Touch/iPhone to your computer using a USB cable.
- Hold the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons together for about 10 seconds.
- Release the Sleep/Wake button but continue holding the Home button.
- Your computer shoud