If it's so healthy for the battery then why not build it that way?

[miyanc]

So I read all the time that it's best to keep the phone between 25 and 75. Basically not letting it die all the time but also not leaving it plugged in all night. Well if that's the case why not design the phone with a charging default to go to 100, then trickle down to 95, then back up to 100. Or something like that.

I want to leave the house every day with it at or very near 100%. I am hoping my shiny new pixel xl will be better then my other various Android devices, but I live in a weak spot. Literally the surrounding house are fine, but my house is right in the middle of 3 towers. Although all three are entwined my house falls magically just out side all three. So my phone's are fighting poor signal all night. For work I am not allowed to airplane. Even still I have a busy job, in and out and all over. It's not easy to plug it in.

I am not concerned so much with this phone. I am betting I have plenty battery, but I still feel better keeping it plug all night. My note 7 was the first device I could leave all things on and last thru the day without worry,. I still left it charged all night.

So why not program all phones to manage then charging process. Or even like a nest thermostat that learns your patterns and start charging 2.5 hours before the alarm goes off?

 

[LeoRex]

Smart charging... yeah, I guess they could add in a bit more.

The 20-80 thing is more a best practice than a hard requirement. There's a scale... on one end is things that can cause instant damage to your battery... like leaving it on your dash of your car on a hot sunny day, or hitting it with a hammer. Then there's the next group, like constantly running your phone down to the point where it turns off. That'll quickly lead to the battery losing its ability to hold a full charge.

Then there's the third group.... practices that could, over time, help degrade your battery a little bit quicker than it if you followed best practices every time but aren't horribly bad. Like leaving your phone on a charger when it's reached full charge (it basically will 'bounce' charge it near 100%, which isn't the best thing for the cells). Here's where the 20-80 rule comes in. In an ideal world, yes, we would not let our phones get any lower than 20% and at 80% we would take them off the charger. But that would also greatly reduce the amount of time per charge... and people would cry foul at such a drastic reduction in battery life.

So why don't the OEMs refactor the batteries, set 20% to 0% and 80 to 100? We wouldn't like it. And that range isn't extremely destructive... I typically will have mine on the charger before it gets below 40% and always pop it off shortly after it hits 100... and I've never had to replace a battery on my phone. My 6P, which is nearing its 1 year birthday, doesn't show any indication of battery degradation. The Nexus 6 I had before it, after a year of use, was showing that its capacity had reduced about 5 to 10 mah.... which, based on my usage, means I lost about 48 seconds of screen time between charges.

 

[miyanc]

Smart charging... yeah, I guess they could add in a bit more.

The 20-80 thing is more a best practice than a hard requirement. There's a scale... on one end is things that can cause instant damage to your battery... like leaving it on your dash of your car on a hot sunny day, or hitting it with a hammer. Then there's the next group, like constantly running your phone down to the point where it turns off. That'll quickly lead to the battery losing its ability to hold a full charge.

Then there's the third group.... practices that could, over time, help degrade your battery a little bit quicker than it if you followed best practices every time but aren't horribly bad. Like leaving your phone on a charger when it's reached full charge (it basically will 'bounce' charge it near 100%, which isn't the best thing for the cells). Here's where the 20-80 rule comes in. In an ideal world, yes, we would not let our phones get any lower than 20% and at 80% we would take them off the charger. But that would also greatly reduce the amount of time per charge... and people would cry foul at such a drastic reduction in battery life.

So why don't the OEMs refactor the batteries, set 20% to 0% and 80 to 100? We wouldn't like it. And that range isn't extremely destructive... I typically will have mine on the charger before it gets below 40% and always pop it off shortly after it hits 100... and I've never had to replace a battery on my phone. My 6P, which is nearing its 1 year birthday, doesn't show any indication of battery degradation. The Nexus 6 I had before it, after a year of use, was showing that its capacity had reduced about 5 to 10 mah.... which, based on my usage, means I lost about 48 seconds of screen time between charges.

I get what your saying it all makes perfect sense. I am usually to lazy to be able to adjust my charging and like I said I sit all night trying real hard to stay connected so I get why my drains faster over night. I thought about making it part of my routine to plug it in when I get up (now that it says 7 hours in 15 minutes, I am not sure what that equates to in percentage).

And I also understand the comparison to people not getting it, but those people can all go use iphone and keep having things spoon fed. I also understand by design android will not be able to compete with apple spec for spec. So apple wins in more areas in spite of more spec loaded android phones. Battery being one of them. Some say its RAM management and I get that, but wouldnt the next level of approach be do better with what you got. Apple does. If the note 7 issue tell us anything its that maybe we are pushing current tech a bit to far.

My thoughts are that if the trend is to continue to make devices without battery replace ability ( i get the reason why is to force people to upgrade to new phones instead of buying a battery), then why not allow those willing to enable this feature to possibly care for the battery over the course of the life of the phone. Look people don't lower the volume and complain its not loud enough. Or wait they probably do but I will not speak for those people, they can also go buy an iphone. How about part of the AI is to learn my battery practices and have a setting to make the normal day 20-80 with settings like lazy day, active day or off. but if I go from 100 to 35 every day the make my 100 and 0, 17.5 and 82.5. I can obviously tap into the 17.5 if needed and the system can learn to adjust.

I get it becomes a spec war and people talk about batteries like each person isnt different. I could easily start complaining about battery drain over night like its the phones fault. or play 2 hours of some game and say the battery is dropping fast. But some of us, especially those wanting a nexus/pixel/note type device usually we are looking to get the most out of our device. the more features we can customize to make our phone work for us the better it is for us. Of course they could make the phone more like the iphone. " here you go we adjusted it to suit EVERYONE be WE know YOU better then YOU do..." I prefer having the choise. Maybe we will see something like this in the future. Maybe someone from samsung will read this and FIX THE NOTE8...
I now have the pixel xl and I am sure it will be a good phone. Its not the note7.

 

[Morty2264]

Smart charging... yeah, I guess they could add in a bit more.

The 20-80 thing is more a best practice than a hard requirement. There's a scale... on one end is things that can cause instant damage to your battery... like leaving it on your dash of your car on a hot sunny day, or hitting it with a hammer. Then there's the next group, like constantly running your phone down to the point where it turns off. That'll quickly lead to the battery losing its ability to hold a full charge.

Then there's the third group.... practices that could, over time, help degrade your battery a little bit quicker than it if you followed best practices every time but aren't horribly bad. Like leaving your phone on a charger when it's reached full charge (it basically will 'bounce' charge it near 100%, which isn't the best thing for the cells). Here's where the 20-80 rule comes in. In an ideal world, yes, we would not let our phones get any lower than 20% and at 80% we would take them off the charger. But that would also greatly reduce the amount of time per charge... and people would cry foul at such a drastic reduction in battery life.

So why don't the OEMs refactor the batteries, set 20% to 0% and 80 to 100? We wouldn't like it. And that range isn't extremely destructive... I typically will have mine on the charger before it gets below 40% and always pop it off shortly after it hits 100... and I've never had to replace a battery on my phone. My 6P, which is nearing its 1 year birthday, doesn't show any indication of battery degradation. The Nexus 6 I had before it, after a year of use, was showing that its capacity had reduced about 5 to 10 mah.... which, based on my usage, means I lost about 48 seconds of screen time between charges.

Thank you for this very informative post! Awesome to read!

 

[LeoRex]

My thoughts are that if the trend is to continue to make devices without battery replace ability ( i get the reason why is to force people to upgrade to new phones instead of buying a battery), then why not allow those willing to enable this feature to possibly care for the battery over the course of the life of the phone.

Oh, they COULD add charging profiles in there. They've set the limits to where they are now for a variety of reasons, but it's already a balance between capacity and longevity and current cells are designed just about where they want them to be for both. I am sure the engineers have all sorts of cool features they'd like to add to phones, put up a design proposal and go in from of Program Management to pitch it...

"Here's a function that will allow the user to shorten the available charge window to increase the operating lifespan of the battery cell"
"How much would we lose"
"About 40% of the total capacity"
"DAMN, are the batteries wearing out too fast????"
"Well, not particularly.. if you aren't an animal, you can get probably at least a year, more likely two out of the battery as is, but this helps things along"
"Hold on...Hey Bill... what's the metric on the average time a customer keeps their phone?..... 18 months? OK... Next!"

Way I see it, the people that slaughter their batteries in a matter of months would most likely look at this setting, laugh at how stupid it was and ignore it existed... then complain a few months later that their battery was worn out. And the people that are trying to do their best to follow best charging practices already would probably only benefit a wee bit from the feature..... The users that would benefit the most wouldn't use it and the users that would use it don't need it.

 

[Rukbat]

So I read all the time that it's best to keep the phone between 25 and 75. Basically not letting it die all the time but also not leaving it plugged in all night. Well if that's the case why not design the phone with a charging default to go to 100, then trickle down to 95, then back up to 100. Or something like that.

Actually they do. Once you get to 100%, the charge stops. (The charger may show current being drawn, but that's being drawn by the charging circuit, it's not being fed to the battery.) And it's more like "down to 99,<something>%, then back to 100%".

I want to leave the house every day with it at or very near 100%. I am hoping my shiny new pixel xl will be better then my other various Android devices, but I live in a weak spot. Literally the surrounding house are fine, but my house is right in the middle of 3 towers. Although all three are entwined my house falls magically just out side all three.

That's ytour fault - for choosing the wrong carrier. The first choice should be which carrier gives you strong signal where you need it.

I am not concerned so much with this phone. I am betting I have plenty battery, but I still feel better keeping it plug all night. My note 7 was the first device I could leave all things on and last thru the day without worry,. I still left it charged all night.

And you still can. (I've been doing it with various lithium-battery-powered phones for years - and getting years of service from the batteries.)

So why not program all phones to manage then charging process. Or even like a nest thermostat that learns your patterns and start charging 2.5 hours before the alarm goes off?

You can turn off the charging current when the battery is fully charged (which they do) - but you can't charge a weak battery if the owner doesn't plug it in (or sit it on a wireless charger).

 

[miyanc]

it doesn't matter about the carrier. I am at the edge of 3 towers. Verizon is the strongest in my area. There towers extend out farther. In reality now a days they all use the same tower. Its the equipment within the tower that each carrier deploys that makes the difference. in my case no carrier has signal at my house with any consistently. and outside of my house verizon is still the leader. I have had sprint and att niether were any good. With sprint I needed a repeated. I havent tried tmobile but they are not well covered in this area.

rukbat if you are right then why is it suggested to keep it 20-80?

 

[LeoRex]

rukbat if you are right then why is it suggested to keep it 20-80?

We're talking 'best practices' here... not "DO THIS OUR YOUR BATTERY WILL DIE!!!!!!!"

The 20-80 thing is basically where these batteries are their happiest. Everything in them works best in that range.... if you even look at a discharge curve, where they test it under a constant load, the battery drains a bit quick until around 80% where it then plateaus a bit, draining slower, until it gets to around 20% or there abouts where it starts to drop off a cliff.

Now, that isn't to say you will automatically send your battery to an early grave if you have the gaul to fully charge it... you just won't get the absolute maximum life out of it.

There's some equipment used by emergency personnel and first responders... flashlights, some comm handsets and crap... stuff that might sit on a charger for a LOOOONG time before it gets used. On some of these units, their charger has two modes, one of which will artificially limit the charge to 80 or 90%. The capacity might be reduces a smidge, but that's a better option than getting out in the field and having something peter out after a few minutes because the cells were toast from being held at max charge for too long.

The new Dell laptop I got for my son even comes with a new smart charge mode, where you give it start of day times and stuff and when the laptop is idle, say overnight in an office, the charger powers down and lets it drain down to a reduced level where it can hold it there until it gets close to your start of day, when it fully charges it.

Actually, that's sort of exactly what the OP requested.

 

[miyanc]

We're talking 'best practices' here... not "DO THIS OUR YOUR BATTERY WILL DIE!!!!!!!"

The 20-80 thing is basically where these batteries are their happiest. Everything in them works best in that range.... if you even look at a discharge curve, where they test it under a constant load, the battery drains a bit quick until around 80% where it then plateaus a bit, draining slower, until it gets to around 20% or there abouts where it starts to drop off a cliff.

Now, that isn't to say you will automatically send your battery to an early grave if you have the gaul to fully charge it... you just won't get the absolute maximum life out of it.

There's some equipment used by emergency personnel and first responders... flashlights, some comm handsets and crap... stuff that might sit on a charger for a LOOOONG time before it gets used. On some of these units, their charger has two modes, one of which will artificially limit the charge to 80 or 90%. The capacity might be reduces a smidge, but that's a better option than getting out in the field and having something peter out after a few minutes because the cells were toast from being held at max charge for too long.

The new Dell laptop I got for my son even comes with a new smart charge mode, where you give it start of day times and stuff and when the laptop is idle, say overnight in an office, the charger powers down and lets it drain down to a reduced level where it can hold it there until it gets close to your start of day, when it fully charges it.

Actually, that's sort of exactly what the OP requested.

That is exactly what I was talking about. We call it a smart phone, should it be smart for us? Thanks for all you info