Cordless Phones with High Tech Batteries?

ewieling asks: "I will be replacing my current corless phone soon and was wondering if there are any cordless (not Cell) phones that have something better than a NiCad battery. My current cordless phone had great battery life when I first bought it, but soon the battery life degraded until now I only get about 10 mins of talk time out of it. I tried to avoid the 'memory' problems of NiCad batteries, but I still get very little talk time now. My current cordless phone is a high end (at the time I bought it) Panasonic with a keypad, LCD display, speaker phone and headset jack on BOTH the base station and the cordless handset and uses the 2.4 Ghz range, but it still only has a NiCad battery. Can anyone help me find a good cordless phone with the above features that uses better battery technology."

Comments

Just change the old nicads.

[Gordonjcp]

They're really cheap. You can get replacement cordless phone batteries from most decent electronics shops for a couple of pounds - sometimes they're actually cheaper than similar-sized ordinary nicads.

Old batteries are dead batteries

[adolf]

From the tone of your article, the phone itself sounds like it is relatively old.

Nicad batteries wear out. This is normal. They're also the cheapest and safest rechargable batteries you're likely to find, bar none.

So, just replace them. Find a well-stocked Panasonic phone dealer (amazon?) and get the genuine article, or just pick up the appropriate off-brand replacement at the department store of your choice.

While it certainly wouldn't be impossible to design a cordless phone that used rechargable lithium cells, noone seems to market such a beast to the consumer. Probably because lithium batteries are very good, very light-weight, and also very expensive. They also tend to react explosively to mistreatment during the charging cycle. Stay away from lithium rechargables in devices not expressly intended to use them. [FWIW, Motorola Startacs have a microprocessor in the battery pack itself, expressly for the purpose of lawsuit prevention - I imagine most/all other companies do the same thing, but I've never taken apart any other Li-Ion packs.]

You might be able to change the nicad cells with NiMH, but you're not likely to get any net benefit from the exercise. Besides, NiMH suffer severe stamina problems after being charged for too long at one time, which is something that chargers designed for this type account for, and your cordless phone does not.

So. With NiMH, you'll have to remove the cordless phone from the base after no more than 12 or so hours of charging, followed by a substantial drain before the next re-charge. Unless you're able to do this every time you charge it, and are able to train your friends and family to do the same, I'd avoid a NiMH retrofit, unless you anticipate and accept that permenant battery damage will result. [At least they don't tend to explode, like lithium batteries do...]

And at any rate, if you had the discipline to follow such strict procedures, you'd have plain old, cheap NiCads that last forever, just like me.

I've got a 4-year-old, vanilla, Uniden 900MHz analog phone. It works well, having great audio quality at long distances through any number of obstructions.

I replaced the stock battery after a year or so with whatever compatible type Sears had at the time, and things have been golden since.

Tricks:

I use the phone until it's either inoperably dead, or starts in with its low-battery song and dance (blinking light, funky stutter ring when someone calls). When this happens, I place it on the charger, and leave it there until at least the next day. When I feel like using it again, anywhere from six hours to six days later (depending on alcohol intake), I keep it off the charger until it is once again dead. The whole cycle takes from 5 days to just over a week, depending on use.

Those who are keeping score will note that I've got three years of outstanding service from a cheap Sears battery. It takes a slight effort to keep things in-check, but the system (as a whole) is reliable and predictable, which is really all that matters.

That all said, I echo your sentiment: I've got a Nokia cell phone with their smallest available lithium battery. I only ever use it with the cheap, third-party charger I have in the car, which cooks the battery completely in just over an hour. Routine fast charging like that is supposed to always be bad for batteries. But Lithium batteries seem to Just Work(tm) no matter what I do to them, and I still get great talk time and days worth of standby. Must be that microprocessor...

I'd love for a cordless phone manufacturer to start using modern battery systems. I'm even willing to pay extra for it the convenience of not having to bother with the proper care and feeding fo the battery.

Even my UPS, a Best Ferrups 850, maintains its sealed lead-acid battery (a Panasonic) automagically. Once every 1 or 2 weeks, it'll switch over to battery power for a few minutes at a time. It then tops off the battery again and resumes keeping it on float charge. This is all part of the normal care and feeding of a lead-acid battery (your car does it with its battery, too, by virtue of you running the starter motor), but most UPSs don't do it at all. OTOH, I suppose this is no ordinary UPS, but why can't phone manufacturers adopt at least semi-modern battery technology? NiMH would be a good, safe, and inexpensive start. Even my RioVolt came with a pair of AA NiMH batteries, and enough smarts to avoid abusing them.

Good luck!

Battery Bashing

[evilviper]

I hate battery bashing...

There is nothing wrong with your NiCads. They can be just as powerful, and be recharged just as many times as LI & NiMH. In fact panasonic made 1100mAH AA NiCad batteries (if only they'd boosted the voltage as well, they could have been Alkaline Killers).

The problem is simply stupid NiCad chargers. People know that they can handle being overcharged, so everyone has something about as complex as an AC adapter to charge them.

LI & NiMH batteries just get the good quality rechargers. That's why they fare so much better. The only legitimate complaint about NiCads I've heard, is that they don't have keep their charge for months at a time like other batteries. That may be true, but it's not a big of an issue all that often.

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to why rechargable battery makers don't put out 1.5V rechargeable batteries and kill off alkalines once and for all?