Talking on Phone While Charging?

Someone working at my local Verizon store told my boyfriend that talking on your phone while charging it is bad for the batteries. Any truth to this? I've had my phone for over a year, always talk while its charging, and have never had any battery problems.

Whoever told you boyfriend that little factoid was full of crap!

I suppose someone could do some testing to see how the battery is affected. It will certainly charge more slowly.

My instinct: it's not ideal for the battery, but it's probably not that bad. It would be better if the battery were already fully charged but still plugged into the charger.

I don't think I'd worry about it too much, but if you do it a lot, you might as well try to do it when the phone is fully charged as much as possible.

Not full of crap at all--it is absolutely true! There are only so many charging cycles available on a battery--the lower you can run the charge on your phone before completely charging it up again the more total use you will get out of a battery. It is okay to use a car charger when needed however if you are trying to place a rapid volt charge on a phone/battery and charge it at the same time that you are using it then you are basically wasting the cycles available on the battery--which may be okay on occasion however doing it on a regular basis will eat away at these available cycles at a faster pace. Due to the rapid volt charge from a car charger the phone will not truly receive a full charge; thus, when you use car chargers it appears that your phone is fully charged in an hour or less yet when you go to use it the drain goes faster than if you had charged if for 4 or 5 hours on a home charger. Car chargers are fine to use however are not technically "designed" for "all of the time use"; use as needed. It is not technically a harm to the battery--you will just run through your battery charging cycles at a much faster pace and find yourself buying a battery sooner.

That charging cycles issue is true for NiMH and NiCd batteries, but not for lithium ion and lithium-polymer cells. Lithium-based cells work best if you top them up regularly and don't drain them dead.

I have a 4-year-old Nokia 6590i battery (the original battery that came with the phone) that still holds a charge very well. Usually lithium batteries of this age suck. I topped it up twice a day in a car kit when I actively used it, and it shows. The battery is in excellent condition. I estimate the battery has gotten about a thousand charges, and supposedly lithium cells are only good for 500... which is true, if you kill them dead regularly, but not true if you don't.

It is true for the lithium ion batteries; read the backs of the Verizon battery packages--many of them state 300-500 charging cycles.

That's a vestige of NiMH batteries.

Like I said above, I have a Nokia lithium ion battery that has had at least a thousand charges and it still has good standby and talk time. The vast majority of those charges were very shallow, though. This definitely is strong evidence that the 500 charge limit is a bit of a myth.

The Wikipedia article on lithium ion batteries is quite informative and supports my experiences. Google will find you many more related articles.

Kill your batteries dead and you'll get 300-500 cycles. Top them up regularly and you may get a couple of thousand. (I'll let you know when I find out.)