Practical Technology

o believe Apple about its iPad 3 battery problem or not to believe Apple is the question. In a story by Ina Fried at AllThingsD, Apple VP Michael Tchao explained that while the iPad–and iPhone and iPod Touch—display as 100% charged before the device is actually 100% charged, it’s because they’re constantly charging to 100 percent, and then discharging and recharging back up to 100 percent. The point, according to Apple, is to maintain the best possible charge. Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, the world’s leading display and display tuning company, who found the battery problem in the first place disagrees.

While Tchao calls this “a great feature that’s always been in iOS,” Soneira doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as the Apple VP acknowledging “my point that the iPad is not 100% charged when it says so. It’s not the full admission that I would have liked, but it is actually more than I expected Apple would admit to.” In short, he sees Apple spinning how iOS mishandles its battery-powered device reporting.

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Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, the world’s leading display and display tuning company, found while testing the iPad 3’s display, “that the batteries do not actually reach full charge when 100% is shown and need up to an extra hour before the charging is done. After further investigation, Soneira has discovered, “when the battery indicator first says 100% the battery is actually only 90% charged and you get 1.2 hours less running time.”

Apple, however, claimed to CNBC’s Jon Fortt, that “If you charge it more than [when the battery indicator reads 100%], you could actually harm the longevity of the battery.” Nonsense, replied Soneira.

Indeed, Soneira said, “Damaging the longevity of the battery is then exactly what the new iPad’s internal battery charging hardware and software are doing since it is their responsibility to properly control and manage the battery recharging process. It’s pretty obvious that if the new iPad knows that it is fully charged then it should automatically stop the charging! So according to Apple the new iPad is configured to damage the longevity of its own battery if it isn’t manually disconnected from the AC charger when the 100% indicator appears. Anyone that recharges their iPad unattended, especially overnight, will be doing this.”

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Dr. Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, the world’s leading display and display tuning company, is best known for his graphics expertise, but he also knows his way around electrical engineering and physics. During his extensive testing of the iPad 3’s display Soneira also found “that the batteries do not actually reach full charge when 100% is shown and need up to an extra hour before the charging actually stops. So what’s up with that?

Soneira found the problem during his iPad 3 benchmarking. He measured “the power actually drawn by the AC Adapter and first found that the new iPad continues to charge for up to 1 hour after it claims to reach 100%. This affects the battery run time if you stop charging when it says 100%.” This isn’t just an iPad 3 problem. Soneira notes that “Other tablets and smartphones also lie about their charging status.”

Further testing by Soneira has shown that “At 2:00 hours after reporting 100% charge the new iPad hardware started to reduce the charging power. At 2:10 the recharging cycle fully terminated with a sharp decrease in power.” Thus, “The new iPad battery is truly fully recharged 2 hours and 10 minutes after prematurely reporting on screen that it was fully charged.”

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