Being paranoid, I'm charging the reader to full before I use it for the first time but I am wondering if I should top it off all the time or drain it before recharging. For my PDA & smartphone the advice is to charge it often. Would that be the case with the battery in the reader or does it not really matter?

Naah, don't charge it now. You probably have 3/4 of the charge already. And since you'll keep it USB plugged while transferring content, it will charge even more :)

In the "olden days," it used to be the rule to do deep discharges (meaning run the battery all the way down) and then do full recharges on occasion to extend long battery life. These days li-ion, esp. the li-ions in the past few years, seem to work best when you keep them topped off, and I've heard you can actually decrease battery life by repeatedly letting them drain to empty.

But, YMMV (your mileage may vary), every device is different, and there are tons of different Li-Ion batteries these days as well.

My Reader is coming in this weekend, and I'll probably charge mine every time I sync up, which I'm guesstimating in the beginning to be rather often. But I am probably going to try to do a long discharge once, just to see how many hours I might be able to eek out of it.

From reading the other posts, though, it sounds like the battery life is pretty excellent, so I'm guessing I'll end up just keeping it topped off via USB while I play Warcraft or something in the evenings ;)

Naah, don't charge it now. You probably have 3/4 of the charge already. And since you'll keep it USB plugged while transferring content, it will charge even more :)

Just as I read your note and decided I could not wait any longer the red light turned off so all charged. The "olden days" remark hurt by the way tekchic... I'm not that old! :rolleyes:

Oh I've hit the "thirty-something" age too, I think that counts as "olden days" anymore, hehehe ;)

It does old man :)

You're right though, it's like a cell phone, you need to keep it topped off.

All the more reason for a cradle!?

It does old man :)

You're right though, it's like a cell phone, you need to keep it topped off.

Old man?! *faints*..... old WOMAN maybe, but not old man! I promise I don't have any hair growing out of my ears! :uhoh2:

All the more reason for a cradle!?
Perhaps. Leave it in the cradle or charged all the time you can. The worst you could do to modern li-ion batteries is to deep-discharge them. Well, unless the battery is already old, then sometimes a single deep-discharge may help to gain more capacity again (for instance newer Thinkpad notebooks occasionally remind you to discharge your battery).

OK for Lithium based batteries leaving it charged often is better for the health of the battery BUT there is a catch. you also need to exercise the battery every now and then (not sure why they degrade if they are always kept at 100%) this makes sense since its bad for them to be stored at 100% (40% is the recommended storage charge) so I would let 2 bar go away and then recharge whenever convenient.

As for exercise this is my plan. every six months or so I plan to run some mp3's and kill it and then recharge and kill it again. That should keep the cells in shape.

Since I started doing this with my laptops I have stopped killing battery packs. :-)

(my laptop is a desktop replacement so it only runs 35-45 minutes on the battery so its ALWAYS plugged in and I kill the battery once a year (as in dead killed have to replace it) since I started exercising it more often I get several years out of them now.

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

Current generation rechargeable lithium batteries do not like to be left charging all the time. At full charge the batteries are at their most acidic and this causes them to corrode their internal structures at the highest rate possible. Corrosion directly causes loss of battery capacity.

The batteries like to be discharged once every 30 days to "turn over" the chemicals in the battery.

Even after pampering them the batteries often lose 20% of their capacity in the first year. But keeping them fully charged can reduce their capacity by 50% in the first eight months. I've personally seen this happen with iPod batteries.

They do not like to be charged at much above 25C. Charging at higher temperatures reduces the life of the battery by significant amounts. This can be a issue for people using car chargers on sunny days.

Charging them every day isn't too good either. Depending upon the charger design Sony used the batteries are generally good for somewhere between 200 and 500 charges.

Try this link...

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-12.htm

Thanks, Nightwing!

Um, what does it mean?