Are battery monitors accurate?

PPCGeeks4ME · #1 (**permalink**) 07-14-2009, 05:55 PM

Okay, I've been using a cab called acbPowerMeter to monitor my battery usage throughout the day. It fluctuates up and down between 30 mA and 600 mA. I can understand this, since I'm running Palringo always connected, one push email account, two POP accounts checking every hour, and Bluetooth always on. I can understand that such a load would use a lot of power.

However, this battery monitor says that, since I turned my phone on this morning twelve hours ago, I have only used 700 mAh of power, and I'm getting the, "main battery very low," message already. This is hardly half of the advertised battery of life of 1340 mAh.

So what's most likely bad? My battery, or my battery monitoring program?

zsunsun · #2 (**permalink**) 07-15-2009, 01:31 AM

Power monitoring program is not quite accurate try. They relie on the data given to them by the hardware power consumption monitoring at the moment they were polled. Therefore any battery usage that happened between two polls from the software goes unnoticed , meaning there could be a spike of 2000mah that may go unnoticed by software thus presenting inaccuracy.

**Hypnotic2010** · #3 (**permalink**) 07-15-2009, 09:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PPCGeeks4ME

Okay, I've been using a cab called acbPowerMeter to monitor my battery usage throughout the day. It fluctuates up and down between 30 mA and 600 mA. I can understand this, since I'm running Palringo always connected, one push email account, two POP accounts checking every hour, and Bluetooth always on. I can understand that such a load would use a lot of power.

However, this battery monitor says that, since I turned my phone on this morning twelve hours ago, I have only used 700 mAh of power, and I'm getting the, "main battery very low," message already. This is hardly half of the advertised battery of life of 1340 mAh.

So what's most likely bad? My battery, or my battery monitoring program?

Give this technique a shot:
What is Battery Recalibration and Why Would You Need It?

Lithium-Ion batteries (most probably the one in your device) sport a battery level meter, like an electronic "fuel gauge" or State Of Charge meter which is responsible for reading the amount of charge your device’s battery holds at a certain point. Windows Mobile uses the information from those readings to display remaining battery level on your device.

See my thread here:
http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=69762