Care and feeding of my brand-new X5L (charging guidelines?)

[wilberfan]

Forgive me if this has been asked before (although I couldn't find anything in these forums about it) but I'm curious about the best way to maximize the long-term life of the battery, etc...

Should I only recharge when the battery is low? Should I recharge every night? Are full discharges and recharges better? Is a complete discharge harmful? When I charged it up tonight (it only arrived a few hours ago!) it took a couple of hours to charge fully. Is this sufficient? Should I let it charge overnight, etc??

Are there any clear guidelines in this whole "charging" area?

Thanks...

[breakfastchef]

Cowon recommends that you recharge when your battery meter begins to blink. I did a Google search and came up with the following information from http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm...

A lithium-ion battery provides 300-500 discharge/charge cycles. The battery prefers a partial rather than a full discharge. Frequent full discharges should be avoided when possible. Instead, charge the battery more often or use a larger battery. There is no concern of memory when applying unscheduled charges.

Although lithium-ion is memory-free in terms of performance deterioration, batteries with fuel gauges exhibit what engineers refer to as "digital memory". Here is the reason: Short discharges with subsequent recharges do not provide the periodic calibration needed to synchronize the fuel gauge with the battery's state-of-charge. A deliberate full discharge and recharge every 30 charges corrects this problem. Letting the battery run down to the cut-off point in the equipment will do this. If ignored, the fuel gauge will become increasingly less accurate.