I've had nothing but problems with my 650. ... They just do not last. Additionally, I just bought a new battery tonight and installed it. No deal! Dead!...
Interesting. Sounds like perhaps there is a defect with your 650 that is destroying your battery maybe? Does that happen on only one of your units? Ours are two or three years old and we run them for a day and they are still at 70+% charge and that is in the winter. We use them in the summer as well so are cycling them so they are getting used (which degrades the battery over time yet we are still having great battery life).
Did all of your other units have good battery life? Does it have good battery life if you used the AA adapter or does it suck those dry, too? I'd test with a AA pack on your 650 to see and if it sucks those dry fast, it would show it's an issue with the 650 unit and not the lithium battery packs. I'm sure there are bad lithium packs around but for you to happen to get three of them would be odd. Sounds like the unit might be destroying them for some reason or, there is some other issue such as a defective charger is frying them, they are getting exposed to some condition that is destroying them (such as being left in a hot environment like a car in the summer), or something. Will be interested in hearing how things turn out after a bit more troubleshooting.
As a side note for others, one thing I do with all my lithium battery devices (laptop, tablets, phone, garmin, etc) is I do NOT store them on the charger all the time nor store them at 100% charge. That is bad for lithium. Store them down around 60 or 70% charge and you will get longer battery life. So on the garmin, I charge them to 100% overnight right before the trip, use them (which typically runs them down to 70 - 80%, then do not charge them back up. They sit for a week at that % and then I recharge them right before a trip again. It improves life. Even most modern laptops have the feature to only charge your computer battery up to 60% if you have it plugged in all the time. Sitting at 100% charge all the time reduces the longevity of the battery so they finally came up with the option to control charge via software rather than manually plugging and unplugging. Nice.
That won't compensate for getting a bad lithium, of course, so sounds like some troubleshooting is in order. What says Garmin? Is there some test they can do on the unit, on your charging cord or on the defective lithium packs? Only getting 1 year service life out of these lithium packs is out of the ordinary and much different than typical, so I would think that they would be interested in helping you figure out what is going on.