There are a lot of common beliefs about prolonging the lives of phone and laptop batteries – but not all of them are true.
One myth: Recharging a battery before it’s fully depleted will lower its capacity. Supposedly, a so-called “memory effect” will cause the battery to start thinking it’s out of juice before that’s the case.
However, that doesn’t happen with the kind of lithium-ion batteries that are in most modern laptops and mobile devices, say the folks at BatteryUniversity.com.
In fact, constantly depleting those batteries will decrease their longevity. In a series of tests, batteries that were charged more frequently but experienced a lower “depth of discharge” performed best.
On the other hand, the stress of being fully depleted and recharged drastically reduced the number of recharge cycles the batteries could withstand.
The site’s tests did confirm another common belief: High temperatures can do pretty serious damage to a battery’s capacity and longevity, so avoid keeping anything rechargeable in a hot car or other warm places.