extended Battery problem, and 2 PPCs for backup

[Guest clabrown]

PPC / Phone: Cingular Siemens SX66

First Question:

I recently bought a larger replacement battery, 2400mAH instead of the stock 1400mAH. It never seemed to fully charge according to the power meter, getting maybe to 70% or so. I didn't worry about this since it worked and had plenty of extra battery life, figuring that it was probably a problem with the phone not understanding the capacity of the larger battery and calculating the percentage incorrectly. NOW, the last couple days, it doesn't charge the new battery above 26% after an all night charge, and the phone life is noticeably shorter, not lasting all day of light use before getting the battery warnings. Do you have any experience with problems associated with larger capacity batteries?

I have removed and reseated the battery and cleaned the contacts. I have also tried switching back to the original battery which did charge to 100%, then switching back to the new battery, which still only charged to 26%.

Also the LED turns orange and the power screen does say "Charging", so it does seem to understand that it is plugged into the charger.

Second Question:

Do you have any experience or suggestions on syncing 2 PPCs to the same PC? I have been using a Cingular Siemens SX66 PocketPC Windows Mobil 2003 SE for a few years, and it's starting to get a little worn. Recently as the original battery aged, when it got to around 24% - 20% the cell phone had intermittent problems. It would show signal, but not be able to complete a call. It also didn't last all day so I purchased a replacement extended battery and this seemed to fix the problem (see above question for new issue involving charging the extended battery) With that problem in mind I started to think about what to do if the phone or PPC simply failed since it was a little older. Since functionally it's still does what I need, and I didn't "want" a new (expensive!!) phone. I found the exact same phone from Cingular new on EBay at a reasonable price. I know I can move the sim card between phones to move my account. I'd like to sync both PPCs to the same PC so that they are identical. That way if one fails I can simply pickup the other and go on, only losing the info entered since the last sync. What I envision is using one phone, which is synced at least every night while it charges. Then after the "in use" phone is synced, switch to the backup phone and sync it so it is updated with the latest. I know that PPC's are "partnered" with the PC, and don't know how to get around that, and am a little afraid to experiment on my "working" PPC since all my important work data is in it.

Thanks, Cla.

Edited March 31, 2007 by clabrown