Hot swap your battery 22
Having a removable battery is a great feature on the Pre or Pixi line of phones (sorry Veer) for when your battery is almost out of juice and you have a fully charged spare battery just ready to be inserted into the back of the phone. Unfortunately, you need to power down your phone first before, swap out your battery, and then reboot the phone once you have the new battery. that whole process that could last upwards of five minutes or more on some of the older devices.
However, if you have access to your power cord and charger you can actually "hot swap" the battery without needing to turn your phone off. Just plug in your phone before taking the battery out and you may have anywhere from just a few seconds to upwards of 1-2 minutes where the phone will continue to run without the battery. Just plop in a new battery, close the cover and unplug the cord. You should be good to go! Of course, if you have access to a power cord, you may not need to swap out your battery in the first place, but this is an option available to you just in case.
Note that just as a Touchstone can not be charged via a USB connection to a computer, your phone will also not be able to continue operating off of just a USB connection to your computer without a battery. You will need the full power of a wall charger, although this may work with some mobile chargers (the ZaggSparq 2.0 was able to power my Pre2 for about 5 seconds before it rebooted)
Thanks to Vasek Cekan and others for suggesting this tip!
22 Comments
This is a great tip. If you're somewhere that you can quickly plug into AC and swap the battery, that works.
Thanks for posting!
Agreed, swapping the batteries is definitely necessary with my pre+, i didn't know this was possible, i have a stack of batteries, the one's from my 2 old palm centro's fit in the Pre pefectly., GREAT TIP GUYS!!!
Yah, if only there were a way to hot-swap without the power cord. I have 3 batteries - 2 spare, but my power button doesn't work so even though I have 2 backups, they do me no good until I can get to a power cord to kick start the phone.
This wasn't too big a deal until I started my new job which has virtually no Sprint reception in the building. The phone loses a small battery's charge in half a day and even the double-sized Siedo I have doesn't always make it through a full work day. I can last multiple days when I'm "in Network" closer to home. Stupid spotty Sprint coverage.
Power button fix is cake. Razor blade and a rubber band, something to pop off power button. Put small piece of rubber band under power button, replace button, fixed. Did this on the wifes phone and it was quick and easy.
Does this work with these mobile chargers as well? Interesting! Didn't know that!
Should work with any charger that will work with touchstone. It has to do with the charger being "quick charge" compliant, basically gives more power because the charger put positive charge to what would be the data line on the USB cable.
Uhmmm how was I "close". You said the exact same thing I said with just more detail. There is not one thing in your post that differs from or contradicts what I said.
Actually, you were WAY OFF.
You said the quick chargers would use more wires than regular chargers (pump half of the current through the data wires).
Quick chargers don't do that. They simply shortcircuit data+ and data- together. The device understands this as "OK, this is an official charger that's able to deliver more current" and pulls more current from it.
There's NO CURRENT flowing though the data wires.
This is good for when after you've had to swap batteries. So after you're finished charging your backup, you can plug it in and swap to your other battery to charge that one up without having to power down.
well for me i don't have 1-2min... i have to literally do it in like 2-3 seconds.
Great tip!
Just what I was looking for! I now have 4 batteries, and the battery charger I ordered hasn't arrived yet. I've had to shutdown the phone and reboot each and every single time I had to recharge any of the batteries. Very tedious.
I'll give this a try now and post back. I hope it isn't 2-3 seconds as mentioned above.
Update: OMG it worked!! Thanks for this awesome tip! :P
for spotty Sprint reception, I would suggest the patch for turning off data connection. It still lets you use as phone, and reduces battery consumption(or extendeds battery life as you wish to see it) by at least 50% in my case. Spotty reception its a pain to use data services anyways so you dont lose much in those cases.
Actually this can be done. Connect the pre to the usb cable, put it in airplane mode, and turn off the screen. Then swap the battery. Another site had a audio description on how to do this at: http://www.webosroundup.com/2010/12/prenotes-charging-batteries/
The last paragraph is only half-correct. Techically, the current from the USB plug of your computer should suffice to run the device. How would the device charge at all if the power coming from the port is less than the power consumed by the device?
It's just the OS to disallowing it (maybe it's even patcheable).
This hasn't worked for me. For me with the USB wall charger plugged in, if I remove the battery it starts shutting down and I cannot cancel that even when I put a new battery in.
Great tip, I'm going to do it right now!
Hey I got props! Cool.
funny thing is its been forever since I've discussed this topic.
i think the email you sent with that tip was from last june or so... just never got around to writing it up!
Oh man, this is a great tip/secret. Cheers.
It is possible to hotswap a battery while connected to USB only.
You have to wait till the first boot logo glow is over.
Then hotswap.
I have successfully hot-swapped with a portable charger. For me, it's hit or miss, whether I'm plugged in to A/C or portable charger. Sometimes the hot-swap takes, other times it doesn't.
I have found that sometimes when I do a hot-swap, when it comes back, all preferences from all applications, even those that were not running at the moment, are wiped out. To defend against this, I have made it a practice to garbage collect twice before doing the swap. This seems to nearly eliminate the risk of losing preferences. It has happened once.
I garbage collect using JSTop, then select it from the menu. Not sure if there's a quicker way to do it.
I'm running webOS 1.4.5 on a franken-Pre Plus on Sprint.