Being a good boy I like to follow the advice Apple give and fully charge then fully drain the battery once a month but to be honest, it’s a real pain in the ass! To drain it quickly I end up switching a whole heap of stuff on and changing settings etc then running apps. I’m wondering if there is an app out there that is designed to drain the battery as fast as possible? I realise that Apple may not allow such an app so perhaps it isn’t advertised as such.
Any ideas? It would be good to avoid changing all the settings then having to switch them back afterwards.
That’s about the worst thing you can do to a lithium rechargeable. I can see it if the battery monitoring software needs to be “recalibrated” every once in a while, but “keeping the electrons moving” is nonsense.
I’m not sure about a newer iPhone, but on my year and half old Droid, Angry Birds will do it pretty fast. My phone typically makes it from when I wake up to when I go to bed, with normal usage, on about 30% of it’s battery (70% remaining). If I play Angry Birds for more then a half hour or so, I’ll be struggling to make it to bed time.
Other then that, I’m not sure if there’s anything specifically made to do it. I know my last few non-smart phones had some built in features for testing the battery. I think all they really did was keep all the lights on and at full brightness though.
If you really wanted to cycle it all the way down, I would just do what you were doing and not worry about running and app specifically for it. Or, just don’t charge it for a day or so and if you think it’s going to run out in the middle of the day bring your charger to work with you (if that’s possible).
I have heard conflicting advice as well. It occurs to me, however, that recalibrating the battery monitor is perhaps as important as prolonging the life of the battery. By which I mean that if the phone software will shut the phone down when it reads 0% then it doesn’t matter how much charge is actually left because you can’t use it.
Playing games seems to be the best bet if no specific app exists but I would imagine they don’t drain the battery as fast ‘idling’ as when you are playing them.
TBH, I don’t even know if “calibration” is even required at all anymore; AFAIK lithium ion/li-poly cells have a fairly consistent discharge curve so it’s really little more than reading the terminal voltage.
ETA:
the battery itself has monitoring circuitry which will interrupt output before risk of cell damage.
The instructions that came with my iPhone a year or two ago specifically said not to periodically drain the battery. IIRC, they said that it was unnecessary, not that it was harmful.
If you do the full discharge I would suggest recharging as soon as possible as Li-ion eats itself very fast at such low discharge levels. IIRC the optimal level for life is about 40% charged, and drops off at both ends, but at the low end (near 0%) life drops dramatically.
GPS eats batteries quickly. Map your location in the Map App, keep tracking it constantly, and the battery will die down rather fast. Maxing the brightness will kill the battery too.
Certainly is.
Can an electron even stop moving, and still be an electron?
The physics I learned in school (probably long outdated) didn’t seem to allow for that.
Streaming a show on Netflix, or music from Pandora plus leaving GPS on seems to drain the battery pretty quickly. If there’s 20% left and you stream music plus play a video game in bed until the phone shuts itself off, you would only have about 15-20 minutes to kill, then attach the charger before going to sleep.