I've just bought a Scud battery, from Lucia Lui, on the back of dr_frost_dk's extensive testing. It's giving me some confusing results from BME and I'm not sure what (if anything) to do about it. I haven't yet used the new battery enough to verify whether it's actually any better in practice.

As far as BME goes, the old battery typically reported a last_full of around 1219mAh. I took this with a pinch of salt, because it's had 15 months of active use and the figure hasn't changed much in that time. I'd expect the original BL-5J to have lost 10-20% capacity by now, and probably it has, so there's a case for a new battery almost regardless of what BME reports.

So, in goes the Scud, and it charges to 1213mAh, according to BME. I guess I was hoping a new 1420mAh battery would weigh in heavier than a year-old 1320mAh, can't see how it wouldn't, but, dunno how this relates to what BME sees. Now here's where you colour me confused, I don't know enough about battery voltages and charge rates to interpret the numbers. I don't have external hardware chargers or testers. I was going to have a play with bq27x00 but I'm sure I've read somewhere that it doesn't play nice with kernel-power v48, which is installed (can anyone confirm or deny?)

Can anyone inject some knowledge here? My gut feeling is that it may not matter that much, I suspect that if everyone else's results are performance 10-20% better than a year-old stock battery, so will mine be - but it'd be nice to know how that plays with BME, and why if I do have more capacity doesn't BME detect it? I've read a million statements that "BME is crap", and I'm sure it is, but I don't quite understand what makes it so, or what I can do about it. Not sure I need to measure it desperately enough to start playing videos and timing it... I'd just like the best fuel gauge that is attainable on the N900 and an understanding of what is wrong with the one that's built in. I've read countless threads on the subject without really understanding quite how it works...