Care of the Droid's lithium battery

[SwinePunk]

Insignificant. Replacements are inexpensive.

 

[Romple]

It matters more for laptop batteries which cost a lot more and are often more difficult to replace. Laptops are also more prone to damage due to improper use. It's not about exposure to oven temperatures. It's about how Li-ion batteries under sustained use running at 4.3 volts at 60*C will cause severe oxidation and plating buildups that will kill battery capacity. Or temperatures you'd find in a car in a hot summer day (for people that keep spares around).

If your phone battery runs to near shutoff routinely it's not going to kill the battery immediately. Over the course of 2 years it'll have a large impact compared to lighter use, but by then you'll probably be on a new phone anyway.

People that have $200 9-cell laptop batteries need to be a lot more careful with how they use their batteries than us Droid addicts. And when you start getting into other technologies like electric cars and satellites these things matter a lot more.

The biggest thing you can do really is not to use the phone too much while it's charging. IE: using a headset talking to your girlfriend for 5 hours while the phone's in the charger every night.

Full discharge/charge cycles are not nearly as damaging as high heat + high float voltage. But from lab life cycle tests I've done, doing 40-90% charge cycles will give you 3-5 times (on average) the life of doing 0-100% charge cycles. But even then it's going to be a matter of 16-24 months of "optimum capacity" vs 5 years. It really doesn't matter as much for something that gets replaced every 1-2 years.