14
Feb
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[New App] My Battery Drain Analyser Tracks Battery Usage By The Hour, Lets You Obsess Over Lost Juice Just A Little Bit More

Posted by in Applications, News

If we could take a universal count across all platforms asking users what more they want out of their devices, we would probably hear better battery life pretty frequently. As something that many users (myself included) obsess over, we're always looking for ways to get more juice from our devices and find out what processes are keeping us from the illustrious all-day charge. Enter a new app that should somewhat help on the war against bad battery life: My Battery Drain Analyser.

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My Battery Drain Analyzer (or BatteryDrain as it shows in the app tray) keeps an eye on your battery, tracking how much it drops (percentage-wise) hour-over-hour.

06
Feb
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Editorial: The Thinness War Needs To Stop, Or, Why I Shouldn't Have To Carry A Portable Charger For My Phone

Posted by in Android OS, Editorials, News, RAZR / RAZR MAXX

When it comes to high tech, downsizing is often looked at as a sign of progress. Microprocessors meant whole computers, for the first time, could fit on a desktop. LCD displays made them portable - in the form of laptops. Moore's law proved that chips that once would have been classified as capable of enterprise-level computing now occupy devices that easily fit in your pocket. And advanced lithium-ion batteries meant you could finally take yourself off the AC teat for an appreciable amount of time, and you could charge your gadgets over and over without worrying about the ridiculous cycling fatigue that plagued earlier rechargeable systems.

22
Aug
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Is Your ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Keyboard Dock Experiencing Battery Drain? Here Is Why, And How To Fix It

Posted by in Eee Pad Transformer, News

If you have the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer and keyboard dock, there's a chance that you've noticed the dock's built-in battery draining quicker than it should. This is a problem quite a few users are experiencing, and a member of the Transformer Forums by the name of ASUSFAN001 set out to get an answer to the issue directly from ASUS itself.

As it turns out, ASUS is completely aware of the issue and will discuss it openly with customers. The root of the problem is a specific chipset that is installed in certain units and not exclusive to a specific model number.

13
Jan
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Makes Sense: Li-Ion Batteries Have Overcharge Protection Chip Inside

Posted by in EVO 4G (Supersonic), HTC, News, Sprint

Certainly makes sense (get it?), doesn't it. Nearly every EVO owner I know has, at some point or another, complained about the fact that their battery life drops about 5-10% as soon as they unplug it. Well, it turns out that's because of there's an overcharge protection chip inside Li-Ion batteries.

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XDA user willy900wonka decided to tear his extended EVO battery apart, and lo and behold:

What I found was that a 8205 chip is used to provide protection and prevent over charging and over-discharging. Here is a quote from a google search.

S-8205A/B Series Applications-Optimized-Battery-Protection Circuits.
All contained voltage detectors are of high precision between 15mV and 100mV depending on the function.

05
Aug
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[Updated: Facebook Addresses The Issue] Flipz (Of Fresh ROMs): Facebook 1.3 Eats Battery. Hardcore

Posted by in Applications, News

A few days ago, we reported that the Facebook app had been updated, and now included “less suck”; turns out we may have been wrong (that pun will make sense in a minute). Flipz, the developer behind the awesome Fresh ROM’s, has done his homework and found that the updated Facebook App has a wake lock bug that drains the battery fairly significantly.

As mentioned, the problem arises from the wake lock. Wake lock is intended to keep parts of the phone running - typically the screen, but it can be configured to turn the screen off and leave the internal hardware on.