Charging Samsung Galaxy Ace

Default charge indicator in samsung galaxy ace can be used as an example for words like inaccurate and unhelpful. Its highly inaccurate in showing both the current charging status and the progress.

Charging the phone

First time charging - In previous generation batteries, a first time continuous charging of 6-8 hours were needed to attain full battery capacity. But in new generation batteries such as the one used in Samsung Galaxy Ace, you need to charge only up to the full charge point. No need to keep it in supply for longer time.
This is a screenshot from the galaxy ace phone manual that clearly states that there is no need to keep it for a longer period

There are two methods for charging samsung galaxy ace. One is via the AC adapter and other is via USB cable. Charging via AC adapter is faster of the two methods. for details check out my review of samsung galaxy ace.

Native battery indicator dose not show actual battery level in numbers it just show a graphic indicator. This indicator is difficult to interpret so I installed battery widget from geekygouup which is just a 55kb download (Read Review of Battery widget)

Suppose you are charging from 10%, the charging indicator will rise quickly to 53 or 54 within 5 minutes ie, 10%per minute. If you think you have half the capacity by this time you are wrong. The battery will quickly go back to 10% if you start using the phone at that point. The first time I stumbled on this, the battery went back to 15% with 10 minutes of voice call.

From 54% the ascend is slow until it reaches 88% which is a unique level for this phone as the indicator will directly jump to 100% from there.

Indicator in samsung galaxy ace stays at '100% and charging' for a very long time and then only shows up the little blue notification of charging full. There is a long 30+minutes wait for this to happen.

This is the usual charging graph of samsung galaxy ace. The image is basically a stitch of output from a battery graph app. You can see the quick rise to 60 % and the quick jump from 88 to 100%. The phone showed fully charged status about 40 minutes later which I couldn't include in the graph due to space constraints. 

Descend in the battery level is much more decent. The charge decreased almost according to the usage. But the descent below 20% was a little bit slower. This might be because of the aggressive power management kicking in.

At 15% charge, the battery low warning will be shown. When the charge is below 10% the screen become very dim to push the death of the battery as far as possible.


If you know 2 things you wont have much problems with battery level indicator of samsung galaxy ace.

1. Indicator at the half line does not always indicate a half filled battery.
2. Battery isn't full until a full charge indicator appears in the notification.

Also install battery widget to know the actual battery level values.

Update : The power management improved a little bit with the 2.3.4 update giving longer period with full charge but the charging graph still follows its previous path.