Battery Calibration?

[asmallchild]

I've owned the Droid for 3 weeks now, had my 1st hiccup yesterday, would love to hear some of your thoughts.

So I activated GPS to get to work for just the 2nd time (detour). I am 99.9% sure I exited out of navigation mode upon arriving at my destination. There was no GPS icon and I exited out of Maps to the home screen.

5 hours later, I had barely touched my phone thanks to a miserably busy work day.

I went down to the cafeteria, sent a text to a co-worker about grabbing lunch, I am 90% sure I still had a full green bar of battery.

30 minutes into the lunch, I noticed my phone was blinking with a red LED. I thought this was odd since I had never seen a red LED notification before. I unlocked the phone and saw it only had 5% juice left and was about to shut off. So I preemptively shut it off myself just in case I needed the phone on my return commute home.

7 hours later, the phone was still off, my day was done. I got back to the car, I yanked the battery out, reseated it, and then plugged it into the car charger I had recently purchased.

The readout? My phone was fully charged.

.....

What gives? Was there a faulty connection initially so that the battery meter wasn't picking up a correct charge?

How could a phone go from 5% charge to 100% charge with the only change being reseating the battery and having the phone off (and not charging obviously) for 7 hours?

I ask because this is the 1st time I've had this issue. Was really spooked and curious. Thanks for the help.

 

[mikes]

http://www.droidforums.net/forum/motorola-droid/15629-false-charge-status.html#post142211

 

[asmallchild]

hmm, my phone hadn't been shut off or rebooted for a while, maybe it was due for that to recalibrate

i typically keep my phone on the charger for prolonged periods of time anyway

 

[Jebtrix]

Be careful, leaving it on a/c charger while fully charged for long periods of time can damage the battery over time.

 

[hookbill]

Be careful, leaving it on a/c charger while fully charged for long periods of time can damage the battery over time.

Nothing I've read indicates this to be true. The battery charges and it cannot be overcharged, plain and simple.

 

[cereal killer]

hmm, my phone hadn't been shut off or rebooted for a while,

thats when it happened to mine as well.

As you read in that other thread posted above. It's not a problem crap happens : )

 

[mikes]

Be careful, leaving it on a/c charger while fully charged for long periods of time can damage the battery over time.

That only applies to cheap, simple NiCD and NiMH chargers. Lithium cell chargers have intelligence to prevent that.

You _might_ be able to find a "Made in China" one which charges the battery directly and causes problems, but there is no problem when charging the Droid battery while it's in the phone (the phone itself has an intelligent charger).

 

[bd1212]

Be careful, leaving it on a/c charger while fully charged for long periods of time can damage the battery over time.

That's not true. That only applies to batteries in phones that used some different type of battery like 3 years ago. But, to backup what I say, I'm pretty sure that's not true because laptops also use Li-ion batteries and you can keep it on the charger 24/7/365 and the battery would still perform the same.

 

[Jebtrix]

Since I can't find where I saw somebody mentioned a verizon tech saying this, I digress. Only reason I mentioned it is because I have left it plugged in for roughly 2 days and the battery was warm (before i started using it that 2nd morning... sync, wifi, etc was turned off so no real background stuff was going on). Charging circuitry having tiny current leaks when 'off' is far from fiction. Who knows... I lean on caution what can I say