External battery charger

[Jan Henkins]

Hello all,

Hope somebody can help:

I perpetrated the "cardinal sin" to let my FR battery run completely 
empty, so now I cannot boot up to charge the battery. I have purchased a 
generic external charger (meant for Nokia batteries, same form-factor as 
the FIC battery), but it does not charge the FIC battery (I have read on 
the WIKI that most external chargers are useless, but I decided to take 
a calculated risk...). I received a generic 600mA battery (half the 
FIC's capacity) with the charger, and that seems to work OK with my FR 
(apart from the battery level checking that does not work). At least I 
can boot my FR with the generic battery in order to do some 
development/playing...

It seems that it is quite important to have more than one battery handy 
if you want to use the FR for anything serious at the moment, due to the 
really bad battery life(a lot better now with 2008.12 which lasts almost 
20 hours, with FDOM I could barely get 6 hours...). I'm seriously 
considering buying two extra FIC batteries, but then it becomes an 
important item to have an external charger that works. If anybody here 
knows of a working model that is available within Europe/UK, I would 
appreciate it immensely if you could let me know the make/model and 
where to purchase. The battery life situation is actually the very last 
item in my mind that will keep the FR out of mainstream use, the 
available software stacks all have the basic capability to address all 
usability issues (GPRS/GSM et al). TangoGPS is fantastic! ;-)

In the meantime, is there any (non-destructive) way to coax the FR into 
life with the flat battery, so that I can charge it?

Thanks in advance!

-- 
Regards,
Jan Henkins