Seidio 2600mAh extended battery

[Sarreq Teryx]

oh, that's ridiculous looking, i'll stick with the slim extended battery when it's out, thanks

 

[windstrings]

I agree that it's not pretty! From what I can measure it looks like it sticks out about 5/16 inch.

Hey.. easy on the hump will ya?....

Most people never notice it in public if its not pointed out!

 

[xanthus1132]

I received my Seidio extended battery on Saturday. The instructions said to charge for at least 8 hours before normal use. When I put the battery in it was at 70% charge and it only took maybe an hour for it to say 100%. I still left it on the charge even though I don't think it was charging(?). The instructions also said that you need to have at least 5 charges before the battery becomes conditioned and performance improves.

So, today was the first chance on a single charge to give it a try. I took the phone off the charger around 900am this morning. I didn't talk much on the phone today (10-15minutes). However, I texted as normal and used all other data services as normal. It might have even been a heavier than normal day because my wife played with the phone for 20 minutes or so surfing, market, etc. She's seriously considering whether or not to give up the bb.

It is now 1100pm and the battery is at 70%. That is MUCH more juice than what I would normally get. By now I'd either have a dead battery, or would've thrown it on the charger so that I could get through the day. So, I'm pretty happy, but I would REALLY like to see a bit more. I am in IT and this thing is a tool. Actually, the droid is becoming my goto device more and more. For those of you in IT, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about (RDP, VNC, telnet, etc)

Yes. I cringed for a bit when I saw the screen shots of the battery. However, hats off to Seido design for working with what they had. I used to have a motoq with the extended battery and this thing blows the daylights out of that battery/device. As far as looks go... well, like I said, this thing is the tool of tools for me. No gaming.... no facebooking... just a lot of heavy use with wifi, vpn, email, etc. I will totally sacrifice some looks in exchange for added battery life. It's a no brainer. I carry my droid in my pocket and the added size is hardly noticeable. I really didn't notice a difference in weight. However, when I first got the Droid the weight was noticeably different than my feather bb curve. I'm used to it now and actually like the feel so much better. I remember on the motoq a lot of users said they actually liked the feel of the extended battery because it made the phone more comfortable to hold while talking. I never drank the kool-aid from those folks, but I imagine there will be people saying the same thing with this battery. I'm still not really used to the feel of it, but by no means does it take away from the satisfaction of the phone itself.

Overall, I have zero regrets. Once again, I don't care about looks. When I'm on a 10 story roof trying to troubleshoot a wireless problem and need to call someone at the other end the last thing I want to be looking at is how many bars are left on the battery meter. I will probably keep the stock battery close by for the date nights with the wife so it doesn't look like I have a Palm Treo 650 sitting on the table!!

If i find that the battery life improves even more, I will update this post. Meanwhile, I'm putting my 70% charged droid to bed for the night! She's got a big day tomorrow!

Ok, I got my battery like three days ago and it does last a lot longer but i was just wondering if your having the same problem I am. When the battery is fully charged, I take it off the charger and go about my day. Within a normal time frame in comparison to the other battery I had (stock battery) the battery amount would be displayed as 60% or 50%. When i turn the phone off and back on, it then tells me it has 80% or 70% left Is this happening to you as well? Is there a fix?

 

[masterxchief]

Same thing happens to me

 

[xanthus1132]

Same thing happens to me

If only there was a way of a battery app to be written that would display our omega battery's life correctly *hint hint* (at anyone who knows how to do this or knows if it is even possible)

 

[windstrings]

Its pretty hard to tell the life of a battery other than simply monitoring voltage.

Seidio has already stated that it takes several times of charging to full before we will get full capacity, I'm assuming that's because it takes that many times to get all the cells fully equalized...

Lithium polymer cells are a bit more sensitive to equalization issues than simple LiIon.. but are a better battery in that they can be recharged very fast.

An app I use called "batterylife" does an excellent job of following the voltage readout of what the phone reflects by going to battery status.

It also gives you the mv reading.... mine is on charge right now and it says "4212 mv".

I've noticed that coming off of 100% charge with my seidio extended battery, it drops to 90%, 80%, then 70% pretty smoothly and then stays on 70% a while, then when it makes it down to 50%, I can have it on the charger for a short time... maybe 10 minutes and it will go all the way back up to 70% again.

I know its not really at 70% because I can pull it back down to 50% again without too much trouble.

Any time a battery gets charged, it must get hit with a higher voltage than its passive resting voltage so as to force amperage to the battery.

When the phone is turned off the battery no longer has a load on it and the resting voltage can spike up a tad, but when the phone is then turned back on we see the higher capacity reflected with our meter .... that reading is really quite temporary as the battery gets a load on it again it will soon drop back to where it was.
Same thing when its being charged verses taken off charge, verses phone turned off. We get three different levels of voltage readings from the same capacity battery under those three different scenarios that can be misleading.

If you make a meter that is pretty accurate during a charge, it won't be during no charge. If you calibrate it to show accurate during a load, it won't be accurate under "no load" conditions. If you make it accurate under no load "resting load" it won't be accurate under the other two scenarios.

You would certainly think with the software genius we have, we could simply make a program that had the intelligence to know the difference.

But then when we add an extended battery to the phone, now the mix gets changed yet again.

We need to look at these battery meters as a rough guide to voltage only rather than true capacity.

Just like the gas gauge on a car, sometimes the rate the gauge falls does not depict how much is truly left in the tank because of irregular shape of the fuel tank etc... even so these gauges are a rough guestimatation.

Lithium holds its voltage very well until the bitter end, so using voltage monitoring tools to "guess" capacity is even trickier with lithium or even NiMh batteries than conventional batteries on the past as they hold voltage so well until right before they are depleted.

Very tiny mv fluctuations have to be measured to guess what the battery is doing.
But because of the need for that extreme sensitivity when messing with these types of batteries, we also get the "false" readings when taking the load off the battery or taking it off charge.

Hope that helps a little bit.

 

[aaf709]

That's so big you'd think you could store food in there for emergencies :icon_ devil:

Ok, my first youtube video ever and it's of a stinking phone!!?? lol. If you want a different/better shot, please let me know.

Sedio Extended Battery

ON that note.... an emergency.... tornado, hurricane or anything that kills power for a season... folks with a decent battery will be thankful!

Well, there is that. I may get one later on. If I go away for a weekend it would be nice not having to worry about having to charge it.

 

[bmatt8]

2600 mah extended battery

Ok i just got the seidio extended battery for the droid (2600mah). It lasted 18 hours and 34 minutes before it died. I am on my 3rd full charge of the phone. Then the next 5-6 charges you should notice a difference in performance. Below is a timeline for all of you that want to know how long the extended battery lasts. I used it on my day off...pretty heavy usage. This is right before it died, i looked at the battery usage and this is what it read.

Display - 6 hours
Android - 1 hour
wifi - 11h
standby - 1 day 8 hour
voice - 12 minutes
idle - 11 h
media server - 26 minutes cpu
android OS - 20 minutes cpu
Browser - 13 minutes cpu
android core apps - 10 minutes core apps

Those were not that specific. I used You Tube about 1-2 hours, listened to music for about 2 hours, I also transfered about 1 gig of files to my computer that took about 20 minutes.

Conclusion - My battery took about 6 hours to get to 20%. Another 6 to get to 5%.Then when it got down to 5% it lasted 5 hours of heavy usage (youtube, listening to mp3, downloading music) I am hoping since i drained the battery completely it will reset a counter in the phone so that phone itself can give me a more accurate battery reading.

 

[windstrings]

Conclusion - My battery took about 6 hours to get to 20%. Another 6 to get to 5%.Then when it got down to 5% it lasted 5 hours of heavy usage (youtube, listening to mp3, downloading music) I am hoping since i drained the battery completely it will reset a counter in the phone so that phone itself can give me a more accurate battery reading.

Seidio said the battery guage is not accurate with current firmware.... and not likely to be accurate with the next 2.1 firmware simply because its calibrated for the capacity of the standard battery.
He did suggest to drain it once a month or so and keep it on the charger otherwise a good 8 hours before expecting it to be truly fully charged.

I wasn't clear as to whether the 8 hour charge was the "initial" charge or a recommended once a month charge;

I basically keep mine on the charger anytime I'm sleeping and most of the time I'm in my car.

 

[windstrings]

I just found a totally cool use for the extended battery equipped Droid.... try setting the droid on a flat surface in horizontal mode... it sits perfect... almost just like a cradle... perfect for watching TV.com or similar at the perfect viewing angle.

P.S... doing another test... its amazing how much more power you have after it hits 5%.
Its obvious there is much more than 5% left when using the extended battery..... this must be what Seidio mean't when they stated the battery meter wasn't accurate with this firmware.

I"m not sure if getting to 5% and then having lots more battery left is the nature of the beast, or whether the battery "guage" needs to be reset by a full drain.

Now that we both have done an honest full drain to dead, it will be interesting to see if it responds differently the second time.

 

[xanthus1132]

Does anyone know that has a rooted droid if running these commands in a terminal emulator will fix the battery meter for us that have the 2600mah battery? the commands are:

su
rm /data/system/batterystats.bin

the theory is that running this command once fully charged will remove the file the phone uses to know where the battery is on life. once you run it when you are fully charged, you are supposed to reboot the phone so the file is remade? I'm guessing. and this is supposed to change the phones understanding of our new batteries. Can anyone give any input on this? Do you think it will work?

 

[chudilo]

Before you start deleting things just to test it out , you should probably try renaming it first. Meaning, run:

su
mv <filename> <newfilename>

Also I sugest getting a module called "sudo". So that you could run things without becoming root. It allows you to run things with root priveledges.

 

[windstrings]

When one of you rocket scientist figure out how to do this.... let us know! :icon_ banana:

This is getting nitty gritty enough I don't prefer to experiment so deeply unless I'm following someone who is more familiar.

 

[dotster77]

Here's what I'd like to know/see from some of guys that bought the extended battery and also the special shell that works with it from seido..

Decent pictures/video of the battery and the shell.. and does it still sit well at an angle for watching videos or whatever with the shell on it..

Can the stock battery/door still fit while using the extended battery shell ?
If so decent pictures/video of that..

I'm thinking it if's easy to stick the stock battery and door back on while using the new extended shell than a person could take whatever battery with them that they needed..

So if I am going to ski whiteface for the weekend, gots tons of nice packets in my snow gear, and want to make sure I don't run out of juice I use the big battery.. or if I go for a 4 hour run with pandoro and a gps tracking app I use the big battery.. or if I want to watch movies while stuck somewhere I use the big battery..

But when going out for the night or anytime I don't want the bulk I use the regular battery..

One other thought I was having was this.. and I wondered if anyone has done it..
That extended shell is really overpriced for what it is.. I already have a nice black rubberized plastic shell on my phone.. and it was only like 6 bucks for 2 of them.. I'm thinking I could just carefully cut out a spot on the back so the extended battery would fit.. of course that all depends on how well it came out.. might be a disaster and end up looking like sh*t, but I am quite good with little projects like that and I have an extra one anyway just sitting here.. couldn't hurt to try and maybe save a few bucks., if it doesn't work out I'll buy the $30.00 one.

Thanks in advance for any feedback..

 

[Barkleyfan]

@dotster

If you can get past the appearance of the extended door, why worry about limiting yourself to the stock battery? No reason to buy an extended battery, then not use it, but use the ugly back plate it comes with. .