Monday 11 April 2011

Lithium Ion battery (near) disaster

Lithium Ion battery failures are well documented. There were have been many fires and explosions and Sony recalled millions of laptop batteries in 2008.

My phone battery has been getting steadily worse and today on my way to our Bristol branch for some training my phone turned off even though it had been fully charged an hour before.

I took out the battery to reset it and immediately noticed a distinct bulge in the middle of the battery. Here's a picture of the measurement across the middle of the replacement battery that I've had for months but not got around to putting in:

 

And the old one:

 

 Given that this is often the first sign of failure, and that the next sign is failure tends a bit on the firey side, I might just throw this battery away.