Handtops, UMPC - Be Kind to Your Lithium Polymer Battery -

My battery is dead.

I left the OQO on, put it in my backpack, and drove home from work yesterday. An hour and a half later I remembered that I left it on and went to check. My backpack was nice and warm, and my OQO was dead.

Normally you would expect that if the power management scheme was set to "portable/laptop," the OQO would go into standby mode after five minutes, and not sit in your backpack cooking itself to death. Normally the OQO does go into standby mode when running from the battery, but every once in awhile the power management mode would fail to put the thing to sleep, and that must have been the case this time.

My first indication that the battery was damaged was the failure of the white LEDs on the back to illuminate in sequence as they normally would when charging with the AC adapter plugged in. Also, there is a battery fuel gauge in the BIOS screen that normally displays a bar graph of the charge level. Now it says <<<No Battery>>>. And the Windows battery monitor screen also says that there is no battery installed.

I've tried disconnecting and reconnecting the battery and power supply, and I tried leaving it plugged in over night.

I talked to OQO technical support this morning, and it sounds like I'm the first person to destroy an OQO (we knew I would be). Our guess is that I tripped some kind of thermal breaker, either in the battery or in the OQO itself. The computer will still come up with the AC adapter connected, albeit a bit flakey with its battery missing. So we are guessing that the problem is with the battery. I am currently waiting for an RMA. The tech support fellow was not authorized to issue RMAs nor to send out replacement batteries.

I'll keep y'all posted on the outcome, but I am confident that we will get this resolved in a timely manner.

In the meantime, be kind to your lithium polymer batteries, and keep them well ventilated when the unit is on.