Exalted by the revival of his fellow Sigmarion III with enhanced stamina, my Jornada 720 is inspired to transcend his Ultimate Form to reach an even more potent level.
So today he once again visited the Solo Champion, who invoked the powerup ritual on Sigmarion III. Knowing the upcoming challenges ahead, the Solo Champion immediately prepared the necessary tools again and proceeded to the altar.
The ingredient of this powerup is two new famed Sanyo 18650 cells.
Level 2 Battery skill: Enables the user to upgrade the battery cells with both higher capacity and reduced damage to the casing, and less stress as well. 😎
To get started, instead of cutting along the back (the side facing out) as before, the Solo Champion went the opposite way by scoring along the side with the connector.
Soon enough the direction of the gap was detected (pay attention to the way the blade is being inserted in the photo).
To everyone's surprise, it just took a few minutes for the scoring action to open up the casing.
It was encouraging to see that the cells (actually only one of them) were lightly glued to the casing (the black rubber patches). Removing them was non-issue.
According to the lore of ancient tech, this kind of Sony cells were very common on portable electronic devices and laptops alike. They seem to be very high quality cells, as evidenced by their remaining charge after more than 10 (even 15?) years. In fact this particular battery pack still holds a good charge even today! The power meter read 3.94V each. Probably the previous owner of my J720 did not really use or charge the machine often.
The official datasheet says the stock standard battery pack holds 1,500 mAh. However, some sources state 1,300 mAh only. I tend to accept the latter. This website clearly states that this particular cell (Sony Fukushima STG US18650S) contains 1,300~1,400 mAh, not the officially claimed capacity.
In contrast, these new Sanyo replacement cells have 3,400 mAh. So on paper it's more than 2.5 times of the original battery life. As a reference, the Extended Battery Pack is stated as lasting 3 times of the standard pack. I don't have one at hand, but apparenly those bulky packs are a 6-cell arrangement. Putting on such a bulky and heavy battery pack renders the machine a bit unwieldy, defeating the purpose of such a pocketable device. If the original battery life (1,300 mAh) is said to last 10 hours of use, then the replacement 3,400 mAh cells would mean about 26 hours (!?), or more than a full day, definitely leaving all those netbooks and niche umpcs to dust!
Mission accomplished. Charging up (orange LED).
It would take some time to fill up the pack before verifying the upgraded stamina in real fight. Do come back in a few days for a follow-up post.
[UPDATES]
13 Oct 2020: Having fully charged the battery pack, I ran PocketSlay for about 2 hours. Behold, the battery level barely dropped (compared with the old stock battery dropping to half for the same duration)! A very good sign indeed. Will continue my stamina test.
14 Oct 2020: I installed ResInfo WR-Tools (a great small resource monitoring applet) and the virgin charge now runs 10 hours without plugging in the AC the whole time, even during synchronizing on the cradle. 33% battery left. I've read that fresh Lithium Ion batterys need to run one or two complete charging cycles to let the system adjust to the new cells. So far the new cells has already performed so much better than the old stock battery.
15 Oct 2020: The first low battery warning (reading 0%) came finally after 15 hours 35 minutes. Remember this is just the very first charge of the new cells. I believe doing this a couple of more times the battery life can go even farther.
The second warning came at 16h 21min. Audiobook still playing...
16 hours 24 min: The power level was so low that the system said it couldn't go on. Time for recharging.
wow... just wow.
ReplyDeleteI was also very surprised when seeing the result for the first time. Now with moderate usage (1-2 hours a day), I don't need to charge it for almost 10 days. Recelling definitely breathes a wondrous new life into this old gadget.
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