Been testing the Polarcell as a primary battery, this is the first time i have been using my N900 with a single battery for over 1 year and im really impressed, of course i have to say i have been using it very lightly as i have been busy with lots things, but i got 48hours so far.

To which I have to add that the exact same thing has just happened to me with this seller, so this looks incompetence or fraud on the part of the seller rather than a simple accident.

I tried to e-mail them about it and the mail bounced, so I raised a claim with PayPal. I have been refunded in full in under eight hours, which must be a record.

This feels a bit unfair to the seller, but, if they've sent the wrong battery to two of us and their e-mail then bounces, well, **** 'em. Guess I'll go after a Polarcell instead...

Thanks, it's a good idea to get "refund" from ScamPal, as they've scammed me for 180 euro, once. I think I'll find seller of Polarcells that accept PayPal, buy 20 of them, and require full refund, then sell battery & profit...

Seriously though, PayPal is one of this *****y things, totally biased for buyer -, they will refund You without checking any evidence, or even in case that evidence says otherwise. It's good, that it helped You to get refund for fraud'ed batteries, but it should be also a warning for anyone, who accept any PayPal payment. Can't say how I hate this company.

/Estel

Just bought PolarCell one week ago, charged once to full and then measure the capacity today. Amazingly last measured discharge shows 1679 mAh! How is that possible?

However, thanks for letting us know what is the best battery on the market right now, without this thread I would never trust any other battery than original Nokia.

It (probably) isn't. Look for Estel's original post on measuring capacity using bq27200 - the capacity measurement only reduces by a maximum of 12.5% on any one learning cycle. So, if it starts out at 2043mAH, which it often does from factory, or if you've previously calibrated it to a dual battery, then it'll be two or three cycles before you get a true measurement of your battery capacity. Repeat the same - charge to full and discharge to EDV1 - and you should get a measurement around the 1500mAH mark.

@Estel, your comments about PayPal are largely true - much like Visa or Mastercard, they cannot afford to lose buyer confidence or they and their brand are dead in the water, so they have almost always erred on the side of favouring the buyer. But it's by no means automatic - I've had to file 5 or 6 claims in the 8-10 years and several hundred transactions that I've been using PayPal (under 1% of my transactions have gone wrong) and in those cases where it's gone wrong, I've usually had to sit around for weeks whilst they await a reply from the seller, and in one case, a perfectly legitimate claim for items significantly not as described was wrongly decided against me. It's by no means as simple as complain and get your money back, except in those rare situations where a seller has been shut down for fraud.

What are peoples opinions on "breaking in" a new battery.

With the older NiCd it was normally advised to fully charge and discharge a few times to get the capacity to it's maximum.
Is this still recommeded?
I have gotten in to the habit of charging new batterys for 12-15 hours before using them.

with lithium no need to do that at all, i have all kinds of lithium for these tests and for electric vehicles and DIY flashlights amps etc...

No matter how you use them they will not have any weird effects like the old crappy NiCD/NiHM battery's, only 2 things to keep in mind:
Don't go under 2V (ill say 2.5V to be safe) and don't go over 4.23V then all is good.

I will try again in few days (just charged today to full), however I already checked Estel's advice but it didn't applied to my case as my previous battery had around 1100 mAh.

Another interesting thing is that last night the battery discharged completely after I used it yesterday extensively (which was normal since I didn't charged it in the evening at around 20% left and I had running timenow app), and after complete discharge (probably it went to EDV1) I got in the morning the new value 1725 mAh. This should mean that the battery is really around 1700 mAh but I will confirm after next measurement I guess.

yrannadx, if Your chip wasn't calibrated for 2000 mAh or more (as magick777 suggested), and You're sure that no other tricky glitch invalidated Your calibration, there can be only one answer - relative capacity of this battery (for Your use case) is that high.

Let me remind one thing - there is no such thing as absolute capacity of any battery, especially, LiIons. Measured capacity (properly called "relative") depends on many factors - discharge current, temperature, etc. In case of non-constant discharge current (like in any real-life use case for computers or phones, where You have different current usage every second, from 4-7 mA standby, to ~700 mA under heavy usage), it also depends on ratio of "high current "spikes" to low current ones, and even state of Charge, at which such spikes appear.

As a result, using device with lower current, or with more cells at one (like in dual-battery mod, where current for every cell is halved), you will get better capacity than expected.
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That said, it's still quite surprising (not to say doubtful) result. Using dual-scud, which should total @ ~3000 mAh when new, my biggest results - due to moderate usage and benefits of dual-cell layout - were around 3150 mAh. It means, that due to mentioned benefits, my relative capacity was 150 mAh higher than expected (75 mAh per cell) - not anything groundbreaking, yet, still, nice to have.

In Your case, last report is 225 mAh *more* than expected, for 1500 mAh, single-cell battery, used heavily, as You said. That result would be ground-breaking, and would require ultra-low internal resistance inside polarcells, + some other voodoo doing its job.

While I remember shadowjk mentioning very good (low) internal resistance of polarcells (or was it japod? ), it's still hardly to believe *so good* results.
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Summary - I have no idea WTF Give it 2-3 more calibrating shots, and keep us reported. It's very intriguing.

/Estel

I begin to suspect that either something has changed with bq27200, or something has really changed with the newest batteries on the market. With nothing to lose, I've been testing that 1350mAh Scud (that's already been refunded).

My rationale here was that the manufacturing date on it was 20120730, or about one year newer than the 1420mAh Scud that I previously had in use. That was testing at 1283mAh, so I figured if the 1350 was understated and would yield ~1400mAh, it would do as a stopgap.

So, I charged to full, discharged through 2 days of normal use, stopping BME when I hit 6%, and killing the last of the power on a 3G call whilst waiting for EDV1. bq27200 reports an LMD of 1657mAh, and this is on a phone that was reporting 1283mAh yesterday. This is unprecedented, other than by yrannadx's experience.

Yet I'm talking about a different cell, from a different manufacturer, with a different notional capacity, in a different N900 that I've been using for just over 2 years with 2 different batteries (original and Scud 1420mAh) and it's never reported THAT before. dr_frost_dk, maybe you'd be so kind as to test your 1350mAh Scud after all? We can't both be going mad...