[hawhill]

I've been skeptical from the beginning of this thread, and I'm now even more so.

Originally Posted by sirmaru

It appears the Paperwhite can NOT ever be taken down to zero charge.

Of course not. Knowing how a battery works and knowing a bit about electronics in the digital age, that should be rather obvious. Any gadget you have will also probably lie to you about the remaining charge. Customers tend to do stupid things if you don't enforce some basic rules. One of these is: Shut the device down when the battery charge left is reasonably low.

The occurrance of that screen showing a large battery icon discharged and a wire leading to a current icon is probably way above the zero level. That screen also prevents further use until charged. That screen was never present in the Kbd or Fire.

Of course it was on the Kbd. Lots of people found their K3s after one or two months of inactivity on the shelf, showing such a screen. And nope, the Fire won't probably show it. If you read about energy consumption for displaying something on an e-ink screen vs a background-lit LCD, you'll easily understand why this is the case.

If the battery had really gone to zero, the screen would have gone totally blank as had happened with the Kindle Kbd WiFi once and the Kindle Fire 7" 1st Gen twice.

I don't dispute that the K3 might show a blank screen (e.g. if the battery is really worn out (e.g. by doing funny experiments bringing it to its limits very often, like letting it discharge). But the default is the "charge me" screen. The screen of an e-ink device will _not_ go blank if it loses energy. Making it go blank will in fact need energy.

The problem with my PW unit is the battery METER still does not reflect usage.

It never will since "usage" does not really map to linear energy consumption. I've written about that earlier in this thread and I won't repeat my words.

My work around is to just keep reading and recording time usage until the warning screen appears. Then I can simply just charge one hour before it happens in the future until the meter starts working properly at some point.

I fail to see the point in this. Trying out of curiousity how long the battery will last is one thing. But running it down regularly - why would you want to do this? As I wrote again and again, non-linearity of energy consumption won't allow really good estimations of "time left" anyway. What worth has a battery meter that won't allow really good conclusions about "time left"? Not much more than telling you "come on lazy user, charge me". Or reminding you that you just did.

Just charge your Kindle once in a while, as it may fit. Don't bother about run time, it will most probably be long enough. If you travel with it for two weeks or more, take a charger with you.