Hello Google Android world, please welcome this shameful WinMo apostate into your ranks right away (and hello WinMo world, I'm not abandoning you yet) because I'm honestly a good guy who wants to start helping you all buy more batteries smartly as, when it comes to capacity claims of everyone other than HTC that I know of so far, you are in a sea of lies and gross exaggerations. I know this from publicly testing ten batteries for the HTC Touch Pro2/Rhodium/Tilt 2, batteries from the same factories that stamped out many of the third party batteries being sold for the N1, including batteries made by Mugen and Seidio.
As of now, for the Nexus One, I have only tested two batteries: the OEM N1 which is rated at 1400mAh and a Seidio 3200mAh courtesy of Rotohammer. At a 250mA current over a discharge from the phone's charging cutoff down to the phone shutdown cutoff (~4.14V and 3.5V respectively), the OEM battery clocked in at 1357mAh, or 97% of its claimed capacity. That is the best claimed versus actual figure I've seen so far, though on par with the Touch Pro2's OEMs which I tested, also in the mid 90s. The Seidio 3200mAh clocked in at 2691mAh or 84% of its rated capacity and because this was a mega large battery I ran the thing five times, deep cycling and all that shit. On top of those two batteries I also tested thirteen TP2 batteries, two new and one used OEMs and ten third party, no names and counterfeits.
I didn't do this alone. Sean aka Telek and anit77 from XDA guided me through this every step of the way, teaching me a lot about electricity, hooking me up with batteries, answering questions on the threads and I'm grateful for that. I'm also grateful to Shawn aka sm0k3y, Jeremy and my man Steve aka Rotohammer for supplying me with knowledge and batteries, some of which were expensive. So instead of saying "I" I'm going to switch to "we."
So we say hello a little short on information, inviting any of you who want to help find the truth to let me borrow your batteries to test after which, as I've been doing with the TP2 crowd, I would fedex them right back once I've finished testing them. And Nexus One people, all the information I can bring to the table you can use to get an idea of what to expect from their N1 counterparts. TP2 crowd, vice versa. So you want to help us out? Hit me with a message here: http://batteryboss.org/#contact.
How this works:
I am using the Computerized Battery Analyzer III. The software which is somewhat sophisticated plots out milliamp hours (mAh) burned over the descent of voltage from ~4.14V to 3.5V which we have determined to be the level of voltage in the batteries at which point the HTC/Google Nexus One and the Touch Pro2s decide to stop charging themselves and decides it's time to turn itself off because it's too low on juice and you don't want to run batteries at too low a voltage. The CBA software plots out data in graphs, PDFs, CSVs, the whole deal. I hook the batteries up to the CBA which is plugged into my computer. With the software that came with the CBA I have the CBA test the batteries at 250mA, a current in the neighborhood of what the average user would average were he to do his thing (including having push-mail fired up with the screen on bright, downloading and browsing rss feeds, the occasional call, the occasional call being recorded etc) without interruption. Looks a little like this:
The point, in short, of all of this is to supply you with information that will help you choose which battery to buy. Thanks guys.
Doug Simmons
