List your PDA/smartphone history/experiences

[Confused Stu]

Completely discharging batteries is bad for them, but PDA's and phones won't let a battery completely discharge as they'll turn off well before that so you shouldn't need to worry.

My history:

2003 - got an Orange SPV (aka HTC Canary). First phone that ran Smartphone 2002 and was brilliant - colour screen and MP3 ringtones when the rest of the world had bleeping monotone Nokia's. If only Windows had been able to stay that far ahead! Nice phone, horrible keys, ugly and a little tempramental!

2004 - Orange SPV C500 (aka HTC Typhoon). Lovely candybar-style phone that actually ran Smartphone 2003SE quickly and reliably. Suffered from dust getting inside the screen, but turned out to be easy to dismantle to sort. Still have it now as a spare and it runs fine with Windows Mobile 6.1 on it.

2005 - Orange SPV M500 (aka HTC Magician). First touch-screen phone and first 2.8 inch screen PPC. Ran WM2003SE and absolutely loved it. This phone made me realise I could never go back to a non-touch screen but I did miss a keyboard at times.

2006 - T-Mobile MDA Vario 2 (aka HTC Hermes). Just like my last phone, but with a slide-out keyboard and WM5. Switched to WM6 as soon as the first builds leaked, just made it a little nicer. After a year sold it to a friend, who's since sold it onto another of my friends. It's still going strong to this day. Very nice.

2007 - T-Mobile MDA Vario 3 (aka HTC Kaiser). Physically a little nicer than the Hermes, a little faster and built in GPS was nice. It had W6 on it when I got it, within 12 hours it was running WM6.1 Spent some time building ROMs for this and still one of my favourite phones. Well built, reliable and speedy.

2007 - Bought a QTek 8500 (aka HTC StrTrk) in bright pink! Expansys were selling them off at £25 and all sold out within 12 hours. Nice QVGA non-touch screen, now runs WM6.1 and is a great spare phone for when you don't want a bulky PPC in your pocket. Even the pink's grown on me!

2008 - HTC Touch Pro (aka HTC Raphael). Had to get it for the gorgeous VGA screen. Never seen a screen as nice in my life, and the rest of the phone is just as nice. Currently running WM6.5 and is as solid and good looking as the day I bought it. Wonder if the Touch Pro 3 will be out when my 18 month contract's up?!

To be honest, ever since I bought my first Smartphone, I've been really happy with each and have yet to buy a dud or one I ended up unhappy with. Just wish the Touch Pro had as much WOW factor as the early Smartphones and PPCs did, but sadly the rest of the world has caught up and their phones are now as flashy and impressive, but I couldn't go back to a feature (or dumb) phone now after getting used to running whatever apps you want.

 

[frozenlead]

Confused Stu, do you mean the Touch Pro 2 in your last device?

And I've always known to completely discharge and recharge batteries - though, you're correct, you don't want to discharge them all the way on RAM based devices.

 

[Confused Stu]

No, currently using a Touch Pro not a Touch Pro 2 (HTC Raphael rather than HTC Rhodium). My screen's 640x480 rather than 800x480 and I've got a direction-pad (sort of!) rather than a zoom slider. Beyond that, the two are pretty similar.

Although nickel-based batteries do prefer full discharging before recharging to avoid the memory effect, this isn't the case with the Lithium-Ion batteries that most PDAs and phones have these days. Actually fully discharging one of those can damage it, so phones are designed to switch off and stop using the battery before the battery discharges to that point. This means on pdas with volatile memory you can lose your numbers, programs and settings even though the battery still has some juice in it! Probably way too much info, but just to show I'm not just spouting rubbish about keeping our batteries topped up: http/www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

 

[frozenlead]

I'll read that article in a day or two when I get time, nice link.

Most PDAs though have built in back up batteries that allow you to have your main battery dead for a small period of time.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Also take note in that that it's more important not to store the battery with a full charge as that will more adversly affect the capacity of the battery.

We always store our demo devices with whatever charge is remaining in them and then recharge them anew before lending them out, this prolongs their life.

It's pretty hard to completely discharge a battery nowadays even if you're conditioning it, so I wouldn't worry about it too much with normal use, a short would be more of a concern in that respect.