Accessories 1800 mAh Battery

[rnazitto]

So even as a JuiceDefendr user... the battery just plain sucks on this phone. So I saw some 1800mAh batterys on ebay (NOT the Anidia ones) and also some for the Desire which should fit the Inspire. Anyone ever try these? Thanks

 

[El Presidente]

I'd steer clear.

I've bought several "higher" capacity batteries for my Desire HD and each and every time I've returned to stock. Whilst they appear to offer higher capacity at first, after a few charge/discharge cycles, they offer just the same as the battery that came with the phone. I've had a few which are slightly larger and don't sit correctly in the handset, meaning the battery cover takes a bit of gentle persuasion and won't sit flush with the phone.

They're cheap, so there's no harm in giving it a shot, I know a few others have claimed to have had positive experiences, I might just have been unlucky 4-5 times.....

 

[55pilot]

Think about it for a second. The battery is the same size, the same weight and the same chemistry. How can it possibly have more capacity? For you to believe that the battery has higher capacity, you will have to believe that this fly bu night Chinese company has come up with a battery technology that is better than what major battery manufacturers were able to come up with after spending billions of dollars. Does that sound believable to you?

 

[55pilot]

They're cheap, so there's no harm in giving it a shot

There is a huge harm. In the Inspire, the battery fits between the back and the screen. If the cheap battery is a little over-sized and then swell during charging, it will crack your screen. There are several reports of it happening. And it will not be covered by warranty.

I know a few others have claimed to have had positive experiences, I might just have been unlucky 4-5 times.....

The positive experiences are baloney. They are the product of two phenomena:

Someone considers buying a battery. Others say that it is a bad idea. They go ahead and do it anyway. Now they are emotionally invested in the battery being better. Unless the battery is demonstrably a lot worse, they will firmly believe that it is better. That is how religion and politics work too.

The second phenomena is poor test protocol. Someone buys a phone. It takes them a couple of days to realize that the battery life sucks. They spend several days playing with various settings. Some help, some don't, until they reached a point where things are quite a bit better than they were right out of the box. If at some point in this process they had switched over to a supposedly bigger battery, it would be natural for them to believe that the improvement was due to the new "bigger" battery, whereas in reality it was due to the change in settings. They violated the basic rule of testing: Change only one thing at a time.

 

[Xyro]

Welcome to the forum rnazitto!

I have tried two of these batteries at

 

[55pilot]

Whilst you are correct, I don't think it's unreasonable of people to wonder if larger batteries may be available in the months/years after release. Battery technology has got to be one of the more slowly developing areas of technology; we're accustomed to big advances in short periods of time with other things.

Having my fingers in this field, I can tell you that there is nothing better on the horizon that will replace LiPo during the 3-4 year life of the phone (not that most phones are used for that long).

The next big push in Lithium batteries is LiFe which is actually lower density that LiPo and will not help cell phones at all. It is being pushed for hybrid vehicles because it does not have the tendency to catch fire when abused like LiPo does. Search on YouTube for "LiPo battery fires" to see what I am talking about.

It is because of the fire risk that cell phones do not push their LiPo batteries as hard as the RC airplane users do. One of the big risk from the cheap chargers, mislabeled batteries and "change batteries twice a day" regimes is that you may see some fires from cell phone batteries. Hopefully even the cheap chargers are being conservative in their charging algorithms and people are not traumatizing the batteries when changing.

The next thing after LiFe is Lithium Sulfur. That has slightly better energy per volume, but much better energy per weight than LiPo. When that becomes commercially available, it will make cell phone lighter, but will not give much more energy without making the batteries and hence the phones bigger. In either case, you will not be able to use it on your existing cell phones because the voltages are so radically different. You can put a battery and a charger/power-supply in the same package and make it behave like a LiPo but by the time you give up space to that you are looking at the same energy in the package.

There are a few other technologies that are even earlier in the development stages. While they have a lot of promise, promises are all that they are about. It will be years before we know if they are commercially viable and years more before they hit the market in any volume.