Instant Battery % drop???

[racermech]

I just unplugged my phone from my USB cable plugged into my computer. Battery said 100% and green light was on. The screen had not even gone dim yet, so maybe 1 min out of the charger and the batter dropped to 98%. No email, no facebook, no nothing. I was just looking at the home screen, checking for notifications.

Any ideas on this? Try bump charging? New battery?

 

[bjboucher]

Bump charging helps. It could also be the fact that once at 100%, the battery stops taking a charge until it drops back down to 92%. So it may have stopped charging it well before you unplugged it and once you did unplug it, it was showing the actual percent you have left.

 

[paintdrinkingpete]

I just unplugged my phone from my USB cable plugged into my computer. Battery said 100% and green light was on. The screen had not even gone dim yet, so maybe 1 min out of the charger and the batter dropped to 98%. No email, no facebook, no nothing. I was just looking at the home screen, checking for notifications.

Any ideas on this? Try bump charging? New battery?

Bump charging helps. It could also be the fact that once at 100%, the battery stops taking a charge until it drops back down to 92%. So it may have stopped charging it well before you unplugged it and once you did unplug it, it was showing the actual percent you have left.

Bingo. When the unit is charging, it will stop at 100%, and allow the device to discharge to about 96% (at least on my device...some HTC phones discharge as far as 92%), once it reaches that threshold, it will start to charge the device back to 100% and repeat the cycle. The thing is though, as long as the phone is plugged in, it will just read 100%, although the actual battery charge may be a bit below that at any point in this cycle.

That is why when you unplug the battery meter will sometimes drop a few %'s within the first minute.

Any battery will do this, and bump charging wont really affect this particular behavior either. If you want to really test the theory, try to unplug the phone just after the amber charge light turns to green, you'll see it stays at 100-99% percent as you'd expect.

 

[vames]

Good read about that issue here. Short answer, your battery gauge is lying to you. (and that's a good thing.)