Increase ur cellphone battery life With portable devices like cellphones and laptops gaining popularity among consumers everyday, batteries are becoming critical selection criteria for such
devices. With the costs of batteries becoming quite significant, here are a few tips which could help you to wring the maximum performance out of your portable devices. The battery that is used in mobile phones is a compromise between the capacity versus the size and the weight of the battery. In simple terms, size does matter. A larger battery employing similar technology will hold more power than a smaller one. Unfortunately, mobility requires that the device be the smallest and lightest possible. So that leaves us with just one choice. Prolonging the life of the existing batteries. There is another very good reason for that. Performance comes at a price and high tech batteries powering your cell phone could easily cost you upwards of several thousand rupees to replace. Even for the lower end mobiles, this cost, at around Rs 400-500, can be up to 50% of the handset cost. The batteries running our mobile devices are technological breakthroughs, packing the maximum charge capacity within the least amount of weight and volume. To do this, the structure of batteries has become quite complex. One of the worst enemies of a battery is rough handling. Most batteries are constructed to be quite robust, but always remember that some damage is inevitable if the battery is dropped or twisted or otherwise tortured. Another adversary of our battery is heat. Batteries, like most other devices, are designed for a certain temperature range. Go beyond that range and you are asking for trouble. People often store their mobiles on or in the dashboards of their cars. Bad idea! The direct sunlight can often raise the temperature by several degrees. Damage to the battery is bound to result. Another misconception that people have is that the battery will last much longer if they charge it longer. In the distant past, when charging was not so efficient, the strategy of letting the battery charge for a longer period may have helped. Now with overcharge protection built-in into most efficient chargers, it is useless to leave the device on charging mode for more time than specified. Batteries have an exponential charge curve, which means that the last part of charging to 100% will take the longest time and it will be the quickest to discharge. Whichever way one follows, the battery can't hold any more charge than it is designed for. There is yet another reason for not keeping the device on continuous charging. Most of the batteries have a fixed life span of a 400-600 cycles of charging and recharging. Each time a device is left on the charger, the device stops recharging after the battery is fully charged. When that happens, the battery starts to discharge through the device. When it discharges to a present level, the charging starts again. This cycle of charging and discharging cuts down the life of battery quite sharply. The converse of this also wrecks havoc on the life of a battery. That is completely discharging the battery before recharging. Earlier, battery types like the nickel cadmium warranted this treatment because of the memory effect (the tendency of a battery to discharge only to the level from which it was charged the last time). But the newer generations of batteries based on the lithium ion technology, which are the most prevalent today, work better if you charge them before they run out of power completely. So, charge your device when you receive the low battery warning, which is typically at 5-10% of the total charge. To recap, avoid rough usage, extreme conditions and charge your devices properly. If you follow these simple rules, you could enjoy continued 100% performance from your mobile batteries for a long time. However, all things must come to an end. When that happens and your battery gives up, please save yourself from any trouble and go in for genuine new batteries. There is no such thing as a `good' used battery. Most of the refurbished batteries being sold in the market place are quite useless and mostly junk. They could even end up harming your device. To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
