To Train the Battery or not...

[biggienick]

Dunno about cell phones, but with laptops, it's not good to always be charging it but it's also not good to let it go down all the way. there is software in laptops that manage the battery so it doesn't recharge the battery until it gets to a certain point (80% or so).

i've read in some electronics mag that discharging a li-ion all the way is supposed to have negative consequences causing the battery to go haywire.

[nerdtalker]

All of the considerations are pretty much taken care of by the internal charging circuitry in the battery itself, or in the charging circuitry on the device itself.

The "wear" of the battery on a chemical level has more to do with Li+ ions getting "stuck" in the tetrahedral sites of the LiMn2O4 structure of the graphite cathode than some magical properties imparted by fully cycling the battery. The back and forth travel of Li+ ions between the graphite anode and the aforementioned cathode is what makes current, and ions getting "stuck" in either (generally by bonding with other contaminants or because of other ions which also occupy the interstitial sites in the cathode) is what "wears" the battery. It's merely a function of use.

[freeza]

To be honest, i've never trained a cell phone battery before and have never had one start to lose its charge either.

No thanks!

[tguerena]

It may be a good idea to start training your battery. This is one of the most battery draining devices I have seen in a good while.

[Baffles]

You will not be able to discharge the battery enough to do much damage anyway, the battery cuts itself off when charge gets low enough to cause damage (0% isn't really 0%, but its the lowest relatively safe battery charge level). Cycling is how you train the battery to know how much juice is in it, to make sure your % is accurate (or else, as some of you have noticed, it will drain down to a certain % fast, then seem to take forever to go the rest of the way).