Anyone who has dealt with personal electronics knows the frustrations of rechargable batteries and battery packs with short lifetimes that just get shorter over the months.. or weeks. Ok, so most of you don't, but I sure as #@$ do.
Every portable electronic device I own.. my laptop, my pda, my cell phone, my car, my watch, seems to go through this eerie maximum-of-3-year life cycle. First, it's rechargable batteries, when fully charged, last a respectable amount of time. After several months they stop doing so, and new batteries/battery-pack are needed, so I get them. Oddly enough the new batteries do not start out nearly as good as the previous set, and become useless twice as fast. After 3 or 4 battery changes, it becomes obvious that the device's very ability to rechage it's own batteries has gone to hell, or else it has slowly developed a short or leak which imposes artificial load and I have to get a new device.
For my watch the scenario has nothing to do with battery recharging of course, but due to the natural longevity of it's static batteries, it takes a battery the same amount of time to be decommissioned.. which grows geometrically shorter through tie, probably due to some sort of a short or charge leakage.
Posted by jesse at August 9, 2004 08:57 PM