Discussion on:

How and when to charge your tablet battery

Maybe someone can keep up with the info above for a while. But after some time you just don???t care anymore. You just plug it in, charge it and use it. In a couple of years I will probably replace my iPad, so I don???t really care about its battery. Plus, LiPo (Lithium Ion) is considered one of the best batteries today. Good info though.

Which one of those three types of battery is found inside a tablet/ If they all are, could you do me a favor and tell me which kind of battery is found inside the HP Touchpad/ thanks

Either way, the care and feeding is the same.

NiMH hasn't been used in years for consumer electronics because the power-to-weight ratio isn't up to par with Li-Ion and LiPo. (NiMH is still common in cordless phones, and rechargeable cells like AA batteries, but not in a cell phone, laptop, or tablet.)

NiCd was out of style when NiMH showed up, so it's all but extinct now. (Again, some cordless phones and old rechargeable cells still use this chemistry.)

Lead-Acid is what's in your car, UPS, and other large-scale, low-maintenance, low-duty cycle battery applications. It's not something you'll ever find in a portable device. Lead is heavy, can leak, is not meant to be used until depletion, and exhausts explosive gases during charging. I'm not really sure why it's even mentioned in this article except for completeness sake, because it's not relevant.

If your device will be mostly stationary [i.e. it stays on a desk most of it's time and you rarely take it on the road or to the washroom or on the balcony], rem ove the battery and use the charger only. Only nregative issue could be a power failure.
Of course this doesn't apply to Apple gadgets because you can't remove the battery.

Nickel is the element; nickle is the 5-cent piece.

"Of course this doesn't apply to Apple gadgets because you can't remove the battery." I'm not really sure how to even begin removing the batteries from my tablets, sealed devices that they appear to be. I do hope that the batteries can be replaced, and will be really disapponted if I eventually lose the TouchPad due to the battery's eventual demise.

I've been waiting a long time for charging info for lithium-ion batteries!

That last bit about the effect of temp on charging made absolutely no sense to me - the slow and fast times (32-113 and 42-113) overlap by 81 degrees, and I thought I was supposed to keep my battery from getting that hot.

Am I misreading, or is the author mis-writing?

What do you mean by applying a "top-off charge"? Great guide btw.

Most tablet battery specs I have seen are in the 3-4 Amp hour (provide that amperage for 1 hour before voltage drops below usable rating - around 3-3.7 volts) range - they usually specify them as milli-Ampere hours so 3000-4000 mAh. (http://www.batteriesplus.com/t-faq2.aspx#10)

So at max charge with 3.7 volts times 4 amps, that would be 14.8 Watts - hardly anywhere near 1000 (1 kilo) watts (as I recall my basic electronics/physics classes...).

I believe the main danger of concern is from the potentially explosive chemical reaction to excess heat with Lithium-based batteries.

I have the Samsung galaxy tab p1000, the battery indicator show 18% all night after charge and when I charge it to 60% then it jump to 99% in few minute. Something just do not make any sense.
2 questions, what might be the error? and what is the sign that I should replace the battery?
my tablet is about 1.5 yrs old, and so far I have to charge every day.
thanks.

Hi
I've had a generic android tablet (Chinese build) for just over a week. Works perfectly.
However, after following the manual instruction to first fully charge for 6 hours and discharge (twice), followed by 4-hour charge thereafter ... all with tablet switched off ... the tablet only indicated 90% charge... and started to lose it quite quickly.
BUT ... at that point (after reaching about 90% charge, as described above) ... I now leave the tablet switched ON, but IDLE, reconnect the charger, and after about 1 hour or less the tablet shows 100% charge .. and retains the charge quite well (2-5 hours, according to use).
Have I discovered the way to fully charge the lithium poylmer battery? Or am I mistaken?

I've heard it's actually bad to keep a lithium ion permanently plugged in. The battery actually needs occasional charge and discharge.

I have seen evidence this is true based off of laptop batteries when it comes to recycling time... I have 2 users who have laptops but couldn't tell you how to undock them without a call to support. (OK actually they both just retired in the last two months). When it came time to recycling our Dell D620s and D630s, without fail every person whose laptop was always on the dock had a non-functional battery. Every single one. Those who used it as a normal notebook system had functional batteries, for the most part. Out of say a sampling of 50 or so I'm talking here, so not huge but still noticeable.

Also, I've also heard operating a battery operated device that normally works on battery without a battery in it will potentially cause issue on "some" systems. The issue here is the battery itself acts as a capacitor. Power variances are absorbed into the battery, not the device. I don't know if the operating system of some devices would recover a quick or minor hardware issue better than others, so this may or may not be noticeable to the end user. But even so, you may still have things happening in the back end. I've heard this specifically w/ wireless Crestron panels which is just a small tablet w/ WinXP embedded in it when it comes down to it.

You write really good. I really appreciate that. But please write about data recovery from TAB through various methods.