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I have an HTC Droid Incredible. I bought the "Seidio Innocell 1750 mAh Battery for HTC Droid Eris/Droid Incredible", and the instructions that come with it say...

In order to obtain the full capacity of your Seidio battery, we highly recommend that you leave the battery/your phone on the charger for an additional 2-3 hours after the charging indicator turns green or the battery status shows full.

Does this advice apply to the Incredible or is the phone smart enough to charge the battery to full (or at least near full) without any extra charge time? If not, does the battery keep getting charged up after the light turns green?

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This is for battery calibration. Basically there's a sensor in your phone that is used by your phone to tell how full/empty the battery is.

This sensor doesn't actually know how full your battery is, all it knows is how much power is coming from your battery at the time. The problem it has is that all batteries are slightly different, and their capacity goes down over time and usage (a three year old battery will not be able to hold as much charge as a brand new battery).

Your phone keeps a record of the maximum power it's ever had from the battery, as well as knowing the minimum power that it can safely work with before it has to turn itself off. It uses the difference between those two numbers, and the current power at any time to calculate how much percentage of your battery you have left at that time. So with a new battery, the phone might be telling you that the battery is fully charged because it's charged to the highest level the phone's ever seen, but if you leave it charging a bit longer then it might charge more, and then the phone can recalibrate itself and use this new value as the most it's ever seen.

You should only need to do this "over-charging" with a brand new phone/battery, after that the phone know the maximum values, and can more accurately tell you when it's full.

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    Thanks for your answer. I've noticed that if I charge it until the light turns green, then unplug and replug, the light is orange again for several minutes. This makes me wonder if the phone discontinues battery charging after the light turns green, but replugging somehow "tricks" the phone into charging a little more. I'm still pretty unclear what the green light really means.
    – devuxer
    Mar 15, 2011 at 23:35

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