[domo325]

I bought my 32gb PB sometime in Nov and bought Battery Guru app right away. My battery health, according to the app during that time was 92%. Now, January 2nd, it has dipped to 88%. Is this normal? Should I be worried? Seems like the battery health dropped considerably for only about 2 months of owning it. Did I have a defective unit from the start since it started off with only a 92% battery health?

[spencerdl]

Good question, I've had my PlayBook since the first week in May 2011, and my "battery health" is at 90%, is that good or bad, and what exactly does it mean. By the way, great app

[helsinki98]

i got my playbook about a week ago and my battery health is at 90% had 8:30h of heavyish use so far and on 2%

[anindoc]

As far as I can tell, most units get shipped with the battery showing initial health anywhere from 90-95%.
With use and charging the battery health does go down overtime, but I have personally seen the battery health go down to 88 and go back again to 90%. It might not be an exact measurement, but it should be good enough to give an idea of the batteries health.
I had talked to the developer of this app, and he had mentioned that 85-88 is just fine. In an years time that will go down further until the time when the PB battery cannot sustain long uses when it will have to be replaced. Hopefully that will be in a few years time.

The app is awesome nevertheless

[peter9477]

Values around 87% up to 95% seem to be very typical, and "brand new" PlayBooks may report values anywhere in that range and up to 100%, but the upper ones are spurious readings which will, usually, quickly be corrected as the device "learns".

Read a bit more about it here: Battery Guru

The important thing is to monitor that value over time, and make sure it's not dropping too rapidly. So far, I've heard of no one reporting a value that has steadily dropped from the high 80s or low 90s.

I think a couple of people with defective units saw the value plunge to around 60% and stay there, but even normal devices may sometimes show a reading around that momentarily, like for a day, before they correct themselves... remember, it's just an estimate, a calculated value that the OS comes up with to attempt to give you some meaningful information. It's not a direct measurement like voltage or current, so don't expect perfection from it, at least not yet. I expect we'll see this whole area tweaked in 2.0 and a bit more reliable.

For my own units, I have one with 21 recharges at 91% health, one with 41 recharges at 91%, and one with 161 recharges at 89%. I bought relatives new units over the holidays, and they came with 6 recharges and 100%, and 0 recharges and 96%. Both adjusted themselves after a single full drain, to the low 90s. All this is typical behaviour.

[v6pman]

mine is 3.86 v at 94% , recharge count = 6 charger type: none

1 just got the PB like 3 weeks ago

battery is currently at 70% with 2.63 w

weak battery?

[peter9477]

If you mean health is 94%, it's doing great. If you mean health is 70%, that's unusually low.

If the latter, note that after only 6 recharges it means little. Try doing a full drain and full recharge (being very careful to recharge until it stops charging, not merely until it first shows you "100%"), then use it normally for a day or two and see if the health updates to a higher value.

If it's 94% health now, you should prepare to see that drop (or not) in the next while.

New Lithium batteries never really have the full capacity the battery manufacturer claims for them, so a health of 90% give or take 5% is pretty typical for newish batteries.

[teamfortress]

My battery health started with 94% a month ago with 0 charge. About 10 days ago, it dropped to 92%. Three days ago, it dropped further to 91% with around 25 charges. I thought it dropped too fast and tried to do someting: first I used it until it shut down by itself, charged it to full using the charger it came with. Battery health still showed at 91%. The next day I did the same thing but using a rapid charger. Still nothing changed. Last night I decided to do the drain-charge circle again but instead of normal or rapid charger, I used a charger came with my BB 9800 torch. (output rated at 5v 700mhz). The charging took near 10 hours. Guess what, battery health is now back to 92%.
I may try a few more drain-charge circles with the 700mhz BB charger once it starts dropping again and see what happens.

[peter9477]

teamfortress, be careful correlating changes with something you did just before... I have yet to identify a strong correlation with any particular charging pattern, and when I think something may have triggered a (small) change, it was usually one or two recharges ago, if not earlier. (And by the way, your numbers are totally typical, so attempting to get "back" to >92% is probably futile... instead just assume it never really had 94% health but was just "passing through" on its way to the correct value.)

If anyone has actually "boosted" their health more than 1-2% (which is really just "noise" given the inaccuracy of everything involved here), please let us know. It's possible there is some pattern that will help but I have yet to see it.

I've done extensive testing with "full drain then full charge" cycles, with no obvious change associated with it.

I do have a slight suspicion that discharging to around 5-10%, then recharging to only 95-97%, may over a period of time make the health value climb. Even if that's true, however, it may well be only an apparent (not real) increase... if you're not actually exercising the full capacity of the battery, then you can't justify a claim that that capacity has grown. That's what the health reading is really all about, by the way: it's the calculated/estimated full capacity, as a percentage of the nominal 19.98Wh that these batteries are specified at.

[Duffman19]

got my playbook mid december, battery guru says 5 recharges and battery health is 71%. im using my touchpad usb charger to charge it.

could i have damaged the battery?

[Wolfgan]

Peter, is it possible to make the graph interactive? ie positioning the finger on it and shows the values % and W for that position (ie 3:30hs ago, 45% batt lvl, 3.8W power) and update while moving the touch point.
Thx, Wolf.

[hemertwv]

Hmm My battery health as of this morning was 98% having undergone 114 charge cycles. I bought mine day 1 they were available and have been using the rapid dock charger since day 1, it goes on virtually every night as I use todays clock and alarm.

In addition mine has been drained to empty many, many times and then it goes on the charger, it gets used a lot while away from a charger so it often gets drained down below 10%.

[Altarocks]

Mine had been running at 96% until I installed a version of the OS2 beta. It dropped to around 67% for several days or a week, and then returned back up to 97% where it has stayed for quite a while. Kinda surprising to me - I've had my PB since release, and recharge it constantly, regardless of the charge state. I'm at 187 recharges and my battery life still seems strong.

[lexsteryo]

Got my new PB second week of December and at 92% with 23 recharge. Have latest 2.0 beta installed.

[rmah]

So over the past day or two I've noticed the battery sometimes drained a little quicker than usual so I decided to pick up battery guru and do a full drain.

Normally when I put the playbook in standby for extended periods of time it will drain about 2% over 10 hours. Last night, however, it drained 8% over 8 hours. This was done starting at 15%, whereas I had never dipped below 40% previously. Do you think this is a cause for concern or is it just 'learning' its limitations?

Here is the log. The only app was batt guru as the active window. Not sure what would have caused the spikes.

[peter9477]

rmah, that's probably too short a period to get data you'd want to draw many conclusions from. That said, pretending the value's completely accurate, 8% over 8h means it used 0.18W on average during that time, which is high. Normally it should be under 0.1W, generally more like 50-70mW.

If you're on 2.0, that's a likely cause right there (since it's a beta, has the android player going all the time, etc). If not, well, sometimes the OS gets a bit "stuck" and things that should shut down keep running. The GPS service can do that, for example, though it would probably use more like 0.25W in that case. Sometimes I think WiFi also does it even on mine, and other people have complained that their PBs use that much (or more) all the time in standby, not just intermittently as yours and mine do.

If you restart, the problem will clear up for now. I'm not drawing conclusions about it all until 2.0 is out. Think of 1.0.x as basically a pre-release version of something and think of 2.0 as what 1.0 should have been. Many bugs will have been fixed (literally thousands of them).

The spikes are typically hourly housekeeping tasks. Since the power readings are not exactly averages, it will sometimes catch them, sometimes not. It's not a cause for concern either...

[rmah]

Yeah, like I said, previously it was able to go for 10 hours with about 2% drain (I'm on the latest stable OS). I'll continue to monitor it to see how things pan out. After charging my health is up to 92%.

Thanks for the swift reply.

[TheScionicMan]

My pb which was purchased in april has an 87% health rating after 266 charges. My wife's PB which she got for Xmas has a 92% rating after 25 cycles. Seems to me that the battery is holding up pretty well.

[Heavens1]

Thank you Peter for your help re Battery Guru.

On April 16 I got a new playbook from RIM as a replacement and it seems to have shipped at 89% Battery Health, and Battery Voltage as 4.03%.

I was told that this PB is from a 'new' batch .... the serial number starts with 1345.

[vag65]

I got my PB 2 months ago and installed Battery Guru within several days. My battery originally showed 100% battery health. I have noticed that the number will go down significantly for a short period of time if I recharge the battery before it has discharged to less than 30%. It seems like anything above 30% with a full recharge will cause the battery health to show as something around 78 or 76%. Once I discharge it more completely and then recharge fully, the battery health goes back to 100%. After 61 recharges, I am still at 100% battery health. Seems like I am an exception with this reading though.

I just wanted to add my 2 cents.

[Heavens1]

Thank you Peter for your help re Battery Guru.

On April 16 I got a new playbook from RIM as a replacement and it seems to have shipped at 89% Battery Health, and Battery Voltage as 4.03%.

I was told that this PB is from a 'new' batch .... the serial number starts with 1345.

Update my Battery info:

Battery Hlth: 91%
Volt : 4.11

39 recharges

Seems like the battery life gets better the more you use your PB and recharge it.

I use the PB daily and generally charge overnight (turned off) with the yellow tipped charger that came with the PB.

[Jean-luc_Picard]

My battery health is 96%. My recharge count is 161. This is on my playbook I got in late November (also have one from launch day, but upgraded to 64GB).

[Zvdo]

Hi,
I think that reading are not correct because may be we have different hardware devices, so don't worry about 10% overall it's nothing. And don't do that calibrate ( discharge - charge) cycle too much it actually harms your battery.