hand holding a bundle of usb cables

Are you using the right lead to charge your phone?

I recently purchased the brand new HTC One X. What a beast of a phone! I love my gadgets and I love being able to tweak the hell out of my gadgets! This phone is ideal for me. It has a great camera, for impromptu photo shoots, a fast enough processor so I don’t have to wait half an hour to change screens, but most importantly it has a HUGE screen! A whopping 4.1″ of huge screen! However, as with most things in life, this comes with a price….. Battery life!

The HTC One X doesn’t do too badly in this respect and manages a just-about-acceptable once a day charge, but the first time I used it in the car as a sat nav I got a message telling me that I was using more power than the charger was supplying. This worried me, as I had already upgraded to a 1a car charger, so at first glance I was providing as much juice as I could.

A few days later, I had got back into the routine of putting the phone on to charge overnight and picking it up the next morning, when I noticed that the battery wasn’t quite full. This was odd, as it had been charging for at least 7 hours! I checked the charger and that was fine. I then started doing a bit of research and discovered that a cable is not just a cable!

Experiment

I devised an experiment. I charged my HTC for a while with my generic cable and then switched to the HTC cable that came with the phone. I could then look at the rate of charge in the power usage section of the settings.

Results

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The results speak for themselves. A clear increase in charge rate can be seen for the lastfew minutes, which is the time the stock HTC lead was in place!

So, the message might appear to be “Don’t skimp on your leads”, but not so fast….

Slow charging can actually benefit your battery life and capacity! It is known as “trickle charging”.

So, I now have my HTC lead in the car, where I use more power due to GPS use and the screen being on, whilst at home I use a generic cheap lead which benefits the battery more.

The tricky thing now, though, is that there is no way to tell the standard of the lead when you buy it, and the majority of reviewers still believe that a lead is just a lead.

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