Quote:
Originally Posted by iviyth0s
I was wondering though, is there a way I could check the mAh myself when I get the battery?? like with a multimeter or something?
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In short, no. mAh is a
performance metric, not an electrical metric like voltage.
It's sort of like, for the inevitable car analogy, horsepower on a car. Imagine a car industry where no one regulated how manufacturers rated their engines for power output and no one ever cared enough to actually test a car for power output. You'd have manufacturers pumping nitro into the engines to get stupidly inflated measurements, you'd have manufacturers measuring HP at the crank instead of at the wheels, and you'd have manufacturers simply making numbers up to be "one better" than the competition. No one would ever really know, since no one ever does any actual independent tests (who cares enough to set up any sort of valid scientific test for a bunch of $10 eBay batteries?).
mAh ratings are, as I said, performance metrics. There are lots of ways to measure the performance of a battery. There are so many variables that have a huge influence on the final "rating," such as temperature and current. A given battery will measure a vastly different mAh rating when putting out 200 mA at 75 degrees than it will putting out 2000 mA at 15 degrees.
And that's assuming they do any measurements at all. Do you really think the generic, no-name battery manufacturer in China shipping out batteries to the US via eBay for $10 a pop for 100 different phones is really setting up and doing valid, honest tests of these batteries for performance? Of course not. They're assembling the batteries to the approximate size and voltage of stock and then slapping them with a performance number that's one higher than the other guys so they sell a few more.
These are the same guys who, under contract to a US manufacturer, paint children's toys with leaded paint to save 2 cents per unit and hope no one finds out or else the large US manufacturer will cancel the contract. Imagine what they do with stuff they're selling direct to consumers through eBay.