Saturday, February 11, 2012

Android Extended Battery Review

By Lucy Wallis


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 the time had come we evaluated one of the Mugen extended battery packs I had 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 (right after the initial 12 hour charge), it seemed to take *ages* for the telephone to tell me the battery was full. Subsequent charges on the other hand seem to be much quicker (about 90 minutes compared to nearly 3 hours at very first). This can be apparently quite standard and is just the phone performing an overcharge for a new battery.

Soon after a couple of full cycles, we decided it was time to test the battery with some times comparing it to a Desire S having a stock battery pack.

Both phones were reset with new email accounts and twitter feeds, each had been set to identical notification update periods. They had been as closely as attainable *identical* to each other with just the batteries becoming different.

Performing identical tasks on them both, the very first thing noticed was with the Mugen powered telephone, the extended batteries remained at 100% for just more than 6 hours where the stock battery had dropped one notch right after just four hours.

Three hours later under very 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 subsequent test was a few of hours of video gaming, eventually leaving the stock battery at 12% although the Mugen was at a healthy 45%.

Finally we set up the video cameras to record HD video, and after just 15 more minutes the stock battery gave up the ghost and the phone died, The Mugen phone still had 30% of it's capacity left, pretty much exactly what we would expect when thinking of the extra capacity.

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

Under very light use, along with no WiFi or GPRS and notifications set to hourly, the stock battery managed a acceptable 38 hours ahead of the telephone went into emergency mode, the Mugen however held up for a very usable 52 hours ahead of emergency mode!

To sum up then, the Mugen is about 30% better under heavy load and about 45% improved below light load; impressive figures indeed, thinking about the low price of the battery I'm surprised HTC don't fit these as default.

I can't suggest Mugen batteries highly enough, specially if like me you're continuously annoyed by the poor battery life of your 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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