If you want your iPhone battery to be the very best it can be, don’t charge it every chance you get.
One habit I had to break out of when I purchased the iPhone was to stop charging it every night, whether or not the battery was depleted. This is an outdated concept with the iPhone because its battery is different than those batteries that were in my other phones. From what I’ve been told about the lithium ion battery, it needs to be exercised like a muscle to get it’s maximum potential. That means you have to let it drain completely and then let it charge completely a few times before you get the most out of your battery. And since I’ve been doing it like this I went from 2 full days of use to almost 3 full days without a recharge.
A funny thing about the battery, there’s so much bad press over it not being user-replaceable that you’d think the battery life stinks. But the truth is that it’s much, much better than any other phone I’ve owned which is nothing short of amazing when you consider how much I do with the iPhone. I play music, I make phone calls, I write email, I surf the web, and I take photos. I generally pick up the phone and fiddle with the interface and software more than I did with my other phones and I’m getting about twice as much life out of the battery.
#1 by Andrea on August 12th, 2007
There’s nothing worse you can do to a LiIon battery than to make several cycles of full discharge-charge. These batteries only need a full charge for about 8-15 hours the very first time you use them and then you’d better not let ‘em discharge under a rough 20-30% threshold. After that, near the internal metal contacts, starts forming some kind of oxide which progressively reduce the battery’s full potential. If you keep the battery charged orve the 30%, however, you’ll be safe.
Anyway, this oxidation process is physiological, so you can only make it slow as much as you can.
NiMH batteries needed that kind of treatment once every 10-20 charges but that’s a different question.