What does 'discharging a battery' mean?

[Drastik]

In the ipod faq it says frequent discharges are not good for ipod. what does this mean?
thnx.

 

[Sparticle]

What does 'discharging a battery' mean?

To discharge a battery means to let it drain fully, or almost fully. While older battery designs need to be fully discharged before recharging to avoid loosing their charging capacity, Lithium-ion batteries are now considered to be the best batteries for portable devices because they can be recharged without first being fully discharged. They are instead designed to not be fully discharged at all. Although this limits the time you can use that battery, it greatly decreases recharging time.

Your manual was explaining how to correctly use Lithium-ion batteries to people who are used to older batteries.

 

[half-mechanic_painkiller]

So if it says anything like Nickel-Cadmium, you have to drain it dry to avoid "memory effect" which means the battery will "remember" its last state of charge..
I think Nickel-Metal Hydride doesn't have memory effect but im not 100% sure..
Oh, and never try to load alcaline batteries, they explode!