Have you noticed that when pulling off the charger from your smartphone, tablet, or laptop, the battery estimated may indicate six hours, then a couple of minutes later that estimate drops down to three hours?
Perhaps you have had it rough, and your device suddenly died without giving you the low battery warning, and you could have sworn you saw the battery estimate at somewhere around 25% just minutes before it died?
These are all battery estimates troubles that befall us whenever we are using a device whose battery has seen better days and is now in need of replacement or servicing.
The Device’s Battery Estimates is only an ‘informed guess’ based on your current usage
You ought to know that remaining battery level percentage is nothing more than a good guess from your device’s Operating System (OS). Take, for instance, your laptop remaining battery power percentage. That is the result of an informed guess by your OS and is all based on your current usage, from which the computer forms a trajectory of your ‘most likely’ future battery power consumption.
That is the reason why you may see the estimate read six hours of battery remaining if you are using the laptop with the display lighting in dim and perhaps reading some document offline. The next minute, if you put the display to maximum brightness and launch a resource-heavy game, the estimate in a minute drops from six hours remaining battery estimate to just two hours.
That goes to show your battery estimate is nothing more than an ‘informed’ prediction by your laptop. The same can be said about your tablet and smartphone’s remaining battery estimate.
All-of-a-sudden Battery Death shows your device no longer accurately guesses the remaining battery
Batteries like most things in life do undergo wear and tear. With time, their health decreases, which means they can no longer hold as much charge as they used to when they were new and/or in good health.
Your laptop, tablet, or smartphone has inbuilt hardware to measure the capacity of your battery, but sometimes it fails to do a good job, leading to your battery dying without you getting the ‘low battery’ warning.
That is often the case when your device dies all of a sudden when the battery level drops between 20% – 10%. It could also be that the circuitry on the battery itself could fail in giving an accurate report on the capacity and health to the OS. Whichever the case may be, that problem could be fixed by recalibrating your battery.
To recalibrate the battery, you will need to first drain it down to complete 0%, and the recharge it to full capacity. Doing so will not make the battery last longer, but it will give your OS a good guess on how much battery charge is remaining and thus avoid incidences of the battery dying on you without warning.