Charging cell-phone battery

[BrianG]

My work-assigned cell-phone has really crappy battery life IMO; and it's only ~1 month old. I leave it on 24/7 and if even I don't use it to talk all that much, I only get about 2 days of life before the battery bars start going down (and when they start going, down, it happens quick).

One day, I left the charger at work and the batt was almost dead. So, when I got home, I pulled the battery out and hooked it up to my Xtrema charger. The cell (1s @ 850mAh) says it is a 3.7v cell, but I set the CC/CV threshold to 4.1v/cell just in case. So, I charged her up at ~0.5C rate for about 2 hours. By the way, the starting voltage was 3.4v so the cutoff is kinda high IMO, but considering the discharge rate, not bad I guess.

Anyway, I was able to get 4 days of charge before I had to charge it again! :dft002: This tells me the charging circuit in the phones probably don't use a real CC/CV cycle - probably just the CC stage.

Has anyone else tried this? Or am I the only one bored enough?