quirky battery meter
 

i just bought my n800 last friday and have cycled the battery fully twice now. i have noticed the battery meter is not accurate it says different charge and power time estimates allmost at random it seems. anyone else have this problem? if so did conditioning the battery by 3+ full charge/drain cycles fix it?

Re: quirky battery meter
 

My 'When in use' estimate goes up and down a lot... I think it is trying too hard to make an informed guess!

Re: quirky battery meter
 

Perhaps it uses how much power you have used very recently to get its estimate? For one thing, it sometimes estimates that you could get nine hours of active use -- this is impossible, in my experience. I have never received more than about three.

I hope a super-battery will become available.

Re: quirky battery meter
 

The battery meter is, to put it mildly, pants. Mine typically shows two or three bars then I reboot and it's down to one shortly followed by low battery warnings.

And bizarrely, my remaining time quite often increases the longer I use the device!

It's totally inaccurate, someone should file a bug...

+1 vote for a higher capacity battery - perhaps a fatter battery with double the capacity and a slightly modified battery cover. Heck I'd buy it like a shot.

Re: quirky battery meter
 

:) I recently took an old OEM battery that didn't work well in my 770 anymore and soldered two rather thin wires to it, running to the outside of my n800. It wasn't too hard to fit them through, given the play in the cover. I soldered those ends to another lithium cell (3300 mAH), and using doubled-sided scotch tape secured it on the back cover. It's far more secure than you'd think and I've never had it fall off. With the added capacity (probaby about 4200 mAH vs the 1500 maH the n800/770 ships with) I get amazing amounts of battery life. Hours and hours of streaming audio, you name it, it does it for a very long time. Wish Nokia would make a standard "fat" battery as this one doesn't fit the profile of the back and is rather thick (about 1/4 inch). Other than the thickness it's about the same dimensions as the standard battery.

Larry

Re: quirky battery meter
 

It's not bizarre at all the the estimated time goes up after a time. It re-estimates the remaining time constantly, depending on the amount of charge in the battery _and_ the current battery drain. The latter changes constantly, because the ARM CPU in the tablet tries to hibernate as often as it can. So if you do something CPU intensive the battery meter may show 1h left, if you later run some different application it could recalculate it to 2h left and so on.
After booting up the battery indicator will naturally show less time left than it'll show just a while later. This is totally normal and as it must be.

My laptop does the same, even though the CPU isn't as extreme as the ARM when it comes to power saving. Hell, even the Audi A4 rental car I had did the same - the meter for remaining distance on a full tank started out with 750km, ten minutes later it dropped to 500km, but some hours of driving later it was up at 1100km left.. just because I was careful with the accelerator. Obviously the amount of fuel left had go down, but that's not what the "remaining distance" meter shows.
And that's not what the battery meter in the N800 shows either. In addition the number of bars may ease up again because a particularly hard drain will drop the voltage level a bit, because of internal resistance in the battery. Check your mobile phone, it'll do the same when you fire it up, particularly when the tiny battery is a bit worn out.

Re: quirky battery meter
 

So what's so hard about a meter that just shows the state of the charge? Some things just try t be too smart, and end up being next to useless!

Re: quirky battery meter
 

I really don't find it useless. Not anymore useless than the same type of metering in my laptop: It's true enough: If you continue with _what you're currently doing_ it'll show how long you've got left.

When that's been said, it would've been nice if it could show the battery voltage directly (as additional information), if for no other reason than the fact that I like to look at voltages.. old engineer and all that.

Re: quirky battery meter
 

I sent off for some cheap battery replacements, and to my surprise the first replacement I've tried seems to last much longer than the genuine Nokia. The meter is just as quirky. however.

Re: quirky battery meter
 

it's not too bad of a thing but it annoyed me a bit when it had 3 bars and a second later told me to recharge and powered down. although i have noticed it is a little more acurate after 4 full battery cycles. as to the comment about actual voltage an app shouldn't be too hard using acpi output.