Cell Phone Battery Life

DTVuser2009 · 10-16-2009, 11:33 AM

I'm curious. of course we all have moments when our fancy cell phones chirp 'LOW BATTERY' and subsequently 'RECHARGE BATTERY' and having it then shut down. but i'm not convinced it's really that low and it's turning itself off early for some reason.

Reason 1: the phone is turned on, then chirps 'RECHARGE BATTERY', and performs its shutdown routine. well, it sure has enough juice to do the dinky little AT&T Wireless animation and have the backlight lit shortly after before going blank! there's apparently more power for that alone!

Reason 2: on laptops, when Windows starts shutting itself down due to low battery power, it sure has enough juice to still do all the Windows Vista logoff sounds, video animation, and shows it up to 3 more minutes. and it said the battery is 'critical?' i highly doubt it!

Reason 3. Boot up an iPhone or iPod touch from a low-battery condition (as in a hard reboot) and it goes through all the booting routines long enough to show the home screen but then alerts the battery is too low to continue, but of course it still even then has enough to go through all the logoff routines?!

Is there still some life left and some reason it's just shutting down early? i don't know. but it does apparently have enough life left to show all that jazz as it goes off! i don't know why though.

Trip · 10-16-2009, 02:36 PM

It shuts down before the battery's completely dead so as to be able to save settings and shut down without corrupting something.

- Trip

DTVuser2009 · 10-16-2009, 03:39 PM

Is there a way to disable that? on my Nokia 3595 (old GSM phone) it does that and i know i could get more life than it says. it's extremely annoying to have it say there's no battery left yet it goes through all those 'AT&T wireless' junk as it powers off.

I can see the possibility of corrupt files on an iPhone or laptop though. just not on an older cell phone. in my opinion though all that animation in the latter two cases if the battery's dead it should just say so and go right off. those animations waste power assuming the battery has any kind of wear.

I was able to turn all that off on my Acer Aspire One as it was doing that when i know i had at least half an hour remaining (just not according to windows) i like to run them down as far as they'll go if i'm relying on them for power. i want maximum run-time when an outlet is not available.

Orrymain · 10-17-2009, 12:31 AM

I've never heard of any way of stopping that. Like Trip said, it's a safety feature for settings. I'm not sure why anyone would want to risk losing your information for the sake of a few minutes of time. That's a risk I wouldn't want to take.

DTVuser2009 · 10-17-2009, 06:09 AM

Shaving off those few minutes seeing all those visual themes would allow those same few minutes to do something else first. then some sort of basic shutdown. but then i'm talking rewriting windows for that.

Trip · 10-17-2009, 10:38 PM

You say that as though the system is wasting time showing an animation on shutdown. When Windows is starting up on your computer and it shows the logo with the little bar scrolling by at the bottom, the system is loading, not wasting your time. Similar situation when the phone is shutting off.

- Trip

DTVuser2009 · 10-18-2009, 09:05 AM

i meant that even though it claims the battery is too low to continue, it still has enough juice left to play a melody, show the AT&T Wireless animation, an animated 'goodbye' so it's not really dead is it?

on my computer, it still has enough left to play the logoff noise ans then sit at 'Windows is shutting down for up to 3 minutes despite it showing 'critical'.

far be it for me to complain but if it has that much left to play all those sounds and animations then it obviously has more power left. i prefer to be able to use all the useful battery life (known as the 'reserve') and i would expect the screen to dim or fade if it was really low. but in both cases the battery seems to have plenty of life.

Orrymain · 10-19-2009, 11:36 PM

Good luck, but in my opinion, you might regret it if you do find a way to shortcut it someday. I just don't think it's worth the risk, but I tend to stand on the cautious side of things anyway.


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