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Saturday, March 17, 2012

Do Extended Batteries Work?

By Colin Gauntlet-Hayes


Being used to the seemingly endless battery lifetime of the BlackBerry, switching to a Google Android came as a bit of a jolt; out of the box I was only getting around 8 hrs of usage from a complete charge. A common report for a whole lot of men and women I'm sure... Immediately after some (well, a couple of weeks) of adjusting I was able to reliably get about 36 hours out of the phone however it nonetheless meant I needed to charge the telephone every day to make sure I would not get a flat battery at an essential time.

I decided it was time we evaluated 1 of the Mugen extended battery packs I'd read about.

I spoke to our pals at MobileFun and asked for the Mugen Power 1800mAh android battery for the Desire S. The following day it arrived in the post, and it was promptly popped out of the product packaging. The first point I noticed was that Mugen recommend the battery be completely charged for a minimum of 12 hours before very first use. It truly is then suggested the battery is allowed to drain completely before recharging once more. This ought to be repeated for the first few charges. At first we thought this was baloney, but on investigating further it's actually to permit the handset to reset it's battery level sensor for the greater capacity battery.

On very first charge re-charge (immediately after the initial 12 hour charge), it seemed to take *ages* for the telephone to tell me the battery was full. Subsequent charges nevertheless appear to be considerably quicker (about 90 minutes compared to nearly 3 hours at 1st). This can be apparently rather typical and is just the telephone performing an overcharge for a new battery.

Right after several full cycles, we decided the time had come to test the battery with some instances comparing it to a Desire S with a stock battery.

Both phones were reset with brand new e-mail accounts and twitter feeds, both were set to identical notification update times. They were as closely as achievable *identical* to one another with just the batteries getting distinct.

Performing identical tasks on both, the first thing noticed was with the Mugen powered phone, the extended batteries remained at 100% for just over 6 hours while the stock battery had dropped one notch following just 4 hours.

3 hours later under fairly high load (both phones streaming from Spotify over a WiFi connection) The stock telephone had dropped to 50% where the Mugen was still at 80%.

The next test was a couple of hrs of video gaming, eventually leaving the stock battery at 12% whilst the Mugen was at a healthy 45%.

Lastly we set up the video cameras to record HD video, and after just 15 extra minutes the stock battery gave up the ghost and the telephone died, The Mugen phone nonetheless had 30% of it's battery left, almost precisely what we would expect considering the extra capacity.

Both phones were then charged up once again for a stand by test.

During pretty light use, with no WiFi or GPRS and notifications set to hourly, the stock battery managed a reasonable 38 hours prior to the phone went into emergency mode, the Mugen nevertheless lasted a really usable 52 hours just before emergency mode!

To summarize then, the Mugen is about 30% improved below heavy load and about 45% improved under light load; impressive figures indeed, thinking of the low cost of the battery I'm amazed HTC do not fit these as standard.

I cannot recommend Mugen batteries highly enough, primarily if like me you are consistently frustrated by the poor battery life of one's Android device.

Characteristics: Capacity - 1800 mAh Exceeds all OEM batteries. Lithium Ion technology. 1 year warranty.

Why Acquire? Extended battery to ensure that you need to be concerned about your battery less. Among 30% and 45% More power than the original battery. You'll be able to still maintain the stock battery as a spare for extended trips. Made with Mugen power cells. No battery memory effect.

Why Not Purchase? If you're content with day-to-day charging. For anyone who is an extremely low use owner.




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