Using spare batteries

[Eric]

Some times when I'm out of the house for a long time I will bring a
spare battery and battery charger (the spare battery was a slightly
larger capacity than the OEM one, which seems to mess with the OS's
ability to gauge time remaining.)

I assume that swapping batteries will mess with JuicePlotters ability
to accurately estimate anything?

Also - on my unrooted 2.1 CDMA Droid I had been complaining about
sluggish OS performance after installing JD a few versions ago. I
uninstalled JD and the sluggish performance continues so I assume
there is something else on the phone causing it? Or did JD leave
something behind?

The phone will often freeze and lag, especially when unlocking the
screen. Sometimes the home screen just loses its icons and I restore
my home from a backup.

[Pawlye]

It can't be JD then, no.

Do u use a home replacement app like Panda Home, A Home, Home++, etc?

I had that behavior when I used Panda. Now that I use ADW and Launcher Pro, I don't have the icon layout loss, but my ph is sluggish to unlock sometimes. I also notice Calendar pegging the CPU from time to time, which also slows response of the OS.

~ Sent from my Droid ~

[Eric]

No, I don't use a home replacement. The phone is definitely less
sluggish to unlock when JD is not on it, but I haven't tried a new
version since 1.7.7, so maybe more CDMA fixes have been done. I
remember there was a group of people with the same complaint about JD
on CDMA phones.

My real question here was about the spare battery, if using a spare
battery would mess up Juice Plotter, and especially so if the spare
has different capacity. The phone's OS isn't smart enough to detect
the different battery. With the slightly larger capacity battery in
the indicator will go below 15%, then if I turn the phone off and back
on it's back at 70%. I can repeat this several times with the larger
battery in it before it is actually dead.

It's frustrating to not have any idea how much actual charge is left.
It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to detect a different
battery, unless mA fluctuations up and down are normal.

[p0rkburn]

I've been wondering the same thing about the batteries. I have two
OEMs and a Seidio. The Seidio seems to throw the system level way out
of wack and it will run down to zero in a few hours, restarting the
phone will show the battery at 70-80%. I don't know how it affects JP
but the battery indicator on the phone is a big enough problem for
me.

I've started using the two OEM batteries unless I absolutely need to
use the Seidio. Three batteries are overkill anyways (mostly just for
traveling or being away from a charger for an extended period of time)
but its annoying as all hell when the notification light is out of
commission because the red battery indicator is flashing for 12
hours.

[Mark Lowne]

Swapping batteries with different capacities:
it *will* indeed utterly confuse the kernel (and everything
downstream, so notifications, JuicePlotter, etc); unfortunately the
only solution would be to 'reset battery stats' using some custom
recovery rom with that feature. Actually, if I'm not mistaken, it's
just a matter of deleting a file somewhere - but it's probably not
possible when Android is booted, so it'd need a boot into recovery
anyway.
You can try doing this once, immediately after fully charging the
largest capacity battery. *If* it works as I expect, you'll avoid the
annoying low battery notifications with the big battery, but your
phone will die without warning with the little battery (which is not a
good thing in general).

Home screen lagginess:
what you describe is most probably due to low RAM, forcing Android to
reload the home screen. AutoKiller is the solution ;)
JD *does* add some lag at unlock, sometimes noticeably; this is being
addressed with the (soon to be released for testing) v2.x builds
(yay!)

[Joe Betsill]

What about switching batteries with the same capacities?

[p0rkburn]

(1) its batterystats.(something), if you have clockwork or SPRecovery
installed there is an option to erase the file under advanced. You
won't have accurate battery levels until its fully discharged a
battery without restarting once or twice, but it does calibrate it.

(2) Starting the with the largest battery is an interesting idea, I
haven't tried that yet. The low battery LED blocking out other
notification flashes is a bigger problem for me than the battery dying
unexpectedly. I know from my pattern of use that around 32 hours I
should be expecting a power off - thanks to JD for the awesome battery
life!)

(3) Perhaps my two Motorola batteries arent exactly the same capacity
despite being labeled that way, but sticking to just those two still
results in messed up levels on both the stock battery gauge and
BatteryLeft. I've been thinking it might have more to do with SetCPU
changing speeds or the kernel not being stock, but thats a completely
uneducated guess. As noted above, I use the stock battery, a battery
that for all purposes looks like a stock battery but was $5 on ebay so
who knows, and a Seidio. The Seidio definitely has a different
capacity, but the issue persists.

Honestly this is way beyond JD's scope so I don't expect a fix but it
is an issue that seems to be affecting a number of people. My ideal
solution would be to simply disable the low battery LED indicator
while leaving the rest.