My kindle touch battery life is getting shorter and shorter between charges. My mom’s is too.
Googling, there’s one company that offers the battery in a kit with a special tool to safely pry off the back cover. Instruction Video makes it look pretty straight forward. 1 yr warranty.
Each model kindle has a different battery. So you have to be very specific when ordering.
Anyone done this yet? What kind of results did you get? Better battery life? Did it continue holding a charge after a few months? Is it worth the $35?
My kindle never got the battery life that was claimed, always being more 2-3 days or so. I should have complained back when it was in warranty but didn’t. As an attempted fix I did get one of these after market batteries. It was easy to install, and works the same as before. So my problem is something else, but it works as well as the original battery.
Mine never seemed to hold a charge either. I made sure Wi-Fi was off. Turn the thing off and put it in a drawer. I turn the thing on ten days later and the stupid battery is 50% discharged.
You can put a double AA battery radio in a drawer for a year. And it’s still got 90% of its battery life. I don’t know what the crazy deal is with kindles running down batteries when they are supposed to be off.
My mom has had better luck. She’s been getting a couple weeks of solid use before needing a recharge. But now her battery is getting older and she’s charging every few days.
Okay. Now, can you do the same thing with any kind of rechargeable battery? Comparing to a AA battery device (by which I assume you mean regular alkalines) is slightly loaded.
I’m not sure. I don’t have anything with rechargeable batteries except my cell phone and kindle. My cell seems to hold a charge pretty well when it’s off. But, I’ve never gone more than two or three days without turning it on.
It would be an interesting experiment to charge a cell and put it in a drawer for a couple weeks. See how much charge it loses.
Depends on the battery type; some have pretty high self-discharge rates.
In particular, Lithium-Polymer (what Kindle Touches use) types lose about 5% of their charge per month just sitting still. Garden-variety Nickel Metal Hydride(NiMH) batteries lose 30%, and low-self-discharge NiMH batteries lose about 1.5% per month.
In addition, with Lithium-Polymer batteries, the permanent degradation rate is strongly dependent on the temperature and charge state- more fully charged + higher temperatures = shorter battery life.
Basically when using a Li-Poly/Li-ion battery, you’re trading off power density (more power, smaller package) for longer life and ease of replacement.
From what I can tell, to get a similar voltage (3.6v) and power capacity (1450 mAh), you’d have to hook up 3 AA batteries in series just to get the proper voltage. Then you’d probably have to double that up to make sure you have adequate voltage after the batteries are half-used or so, since alkaline batteries’ voltage starts out at 1.5, but drops in proportion to the usage of the battery- i.e. 100% charge = 1.5 volts, 0.8 when depleted.
This is unlike most rechargeables where the voltage stays more or less constant during the entire cycle.