Jon Stokes, one of my favourite mobility-focused journalists, wrote in ARS Technica about battery life on the Palm Pre a few days ago and brings up one of my favourite topics. Battery life.
It’s a real issue for smartphones now as the platforms reach levels where they can be considered capable of returning an acceptable web experience but when used in such a scenario, the battery life is too short. Losing your mobile communications because you spent 2 hours messing around on the Internet isn’t the situation most want to be in.
All day battery life on a smartphone!
Read what Jon has to say about the Pre battery life here:
The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life – Ars Technica.
And check out my thoughts on the Pre too. I’d rather see the Pre as a MID than a smartphone. It will still be pocketable but you’ll be able to fit a decent battery on it and still have it in a pockateble format. It’s better for many people to split voice from Internet on separate devices to improve both experiences to the ‘pro’ level.
I’ve also taken a look at this topic in these two articles:
January 30th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Posted a new article: More smartphone battery life red-flags. http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=5404
January 30th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
I Agree this is still a problem, I have had a number of HTC Smartphones, and they all manage a normal day on push email / phone, but I listen to the radio on mine over 3G (gotta love it) this obviouosly has BT and 3G lit all the time and I only get 3 hours… I bet if i tried this with a MID it would last an hour or so !
Will
admin Reply:
January 30th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I did streaming audio over a MID (with Wifi, similar to 3G) for 3.5 hours.
http://www.umpcportal.com/2008/07/intel-werent-lying-the-sub-4w-pc-is-here
Thats with a 10Wh battery, about twice the size of a smartphone battery.
Give’s you a good idea of average drain. Smartphones still have a huge advantage with battery life but the pocket-size means batteries half to be half as big.
Steve
DavidC1 Reply:
January 31st, 2009 at 2:21 am
I think its pretty much clear that Moorestown devices are going to steal lot of smartphone market regardless of what others might think. On a chip level, power consumption differences between ARM and Atom isn’t that much. 800MHz Atom is 40-50% faster while consuming similar power. The difference in power is of course ARM devices consume much less power for other components.
Biggest thing for Moorestown is 1/10x idle power consumption. This will enable the platform to go close to smartphones in that when you aren’t doing anything, it’ll last a day without resorting to standby.
January 30th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Yup. I recently switched from a Treo 700wx to an HTC Touch Pro. While I love the slick interface, the battery life is abysmal. I now keep it charging at my office during the day (which I never had to do with my Treo) and an extra charger in my car, since if you look at it crosseyed the battery level drops 50%.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
i suspect this is why palm introed a induction charger at the same time as the pre.
one on your home desk, another at the office desk, and you just drop it there when you walk in the door.
sure, there have been similar desk chargers in the past, but lately its been kinda hard to locate them in my experience. phones just ship with the standard wall wart and its left at that.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
so … you believe to mobile, but you’r bound to plugs … never go to wilderness
January 31st, 2009 at 10:49 pm
i always got tired of having to buy a extended battery everytime i got a new phone. so i bought a universal battery by Xantrex, mobile power 100, and a Energizer universal battery, it can charge my phone and EEE PCs. thats the way i will probably go until they make better batteries or universal batteries get smaller and more powerful. the 2 i have are Lithium Ion and have 4amps each.
February 1st, 2009 at 11:48 am
What about carrying an extra battery?
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:21 am
Another reason why I’m waiting for the Tegra chip. It has shown ultra-low absolute power consumption, and not only relative to its capabilities. A real breakthrough.
But truth be told, webOS’s synergy and universal search is incredible, and well as the perfection of Pre’s form factor.
February 28th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Smartphone battery life has become a lot more complex. Battery life doing what? Standby, talk, internet, video, audio, streaming music? My take here: http://budurl.com/SPBattLife