Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
No, it does no harm at all to "top up" a lithium battery. Essentially 10 X 10% charges will be the equivalent of one full charge.
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In fact it's better than that - shallow charge cycles generally have proportionally less effect on Li Ion battery life than deep ones (so 10x10% charges could shorten the lifetime less than 1x100% charge), so a pattern of frequent top-ups (which I suspect is likely to be a common usage pattern with the Oasis) could significantly extend the battery lifetime.
As I said in a previous post, it's possible the Oasis designers could further enhance lifetime by exploiting that usage pattern. When used this way, the actual capacity of the device battery less crucial - if it's mostly going to be topped up after partial discharges, it doesn't really matter too much if the total capacity is a bit lower, so the designers could greatly extend the battery lifetime by reducing the maximum charge level. Battery lifetime roughly doubles for every 0.1V the float voltage is reduced below 4.2V (a change which knocks only ~14% off the capacity).