Slow and Fast Charges

I'm sure anyone with a basic electronics background is probably going to laugh at my naivete, but I think I just learned something I didn't know about recharging batteries. I guess I always figured recharging a battery was the same, regardless of whether you used a wall unit charger or one of those cigarette adapter plugins in your car.

Obviously one takes less time to get the battery to "full," but I figured it was just like filling a large bucket-- if you use the sink with the small faucet or the big old garden hose, the end result is going to be a big bucket of wet by the time you're done.

Except I've noticed that the battery charge dissipates faster when I use the cigarette adapter to charge my phone than if I use the wall adapter. It's sort of like the amount of time/use the battery will have before it dies is directly related to the amount of time spent charging the device.

In other words, if I hook the phone up to my car charger until the meter says it is full, I might get about 24 to 30 hours before I need another recharge. But, if I hook the phone up to the wall socket overnight, I seem to get something like 2 or 3 full days of use before I need to recharge-- and the last two bars of power seem to go much further in particular.

I don't know if this is a phenomenon with the battery, or with the technology the phone uses to estimate how much power is remaining in the battery, or both-- but it's an effect I've observed more than once in the past month.