Ok, playing the movie form VOB with C3. Even when the processors enter almost never to C3 stage, WinDVD is running well with a processor almost all time at 400 MHz. The Discharge rate still at -13.651W and the program is predicting 1:42 hours. I'll let it run until I reach 50% of battery life.

I tested a Divx and the processor was running all time between 800 to 1000 MHz while with an MPG (VOB) it runs allways at 400 MHz with a few jumps to 1000 to go back quick to 400. So, guys, forget about DVIX.

Ok, playing movie, c3, 25% brightness, I stoped the test after one hour running, the battery level was at 39% and the program was predicting another 36 Mins of battery life. So probably I was going to get around 1:30 to 1:35 from this test.

So, 13W discharge rate at idle with power saving.

[edit - Ctitanic. Did you note the drain while doing the Divx test? One of your posts showed a 21W drain. Was that with Divx?]

[edit2 - Ctitanic. It looks like you're having no problem playing a VOB right? (assuming the USB bus is turned off) Much better battery life. Is it still jerky?]

Thats bad. The Eo is using only 10W with a much less efficient processor.
We can only summise that the Q1 is of far better component quality.

I'll summarise in a journal entry again and we can now only really wait for confirmation of our results from other people and a response from Tablet Kiosk.

One thing is for sure, its the Eo has some design issues.

Steve.

Well, I have found that since I'm using Hardware Notebook Control My battery life is better. For example, I have been on for 20 min and the battery is at 77%. this program has a setting called dynamic switching that I believe has helped a lot.

Thats good news.

I wonder if that program is over-riding the power-down and getting the last juice out of the battery.

You might have missed my earlier questions:

[edit - Ctitanic. Did you note the drain while doing the Divx test? One of your posts showed a 21W drain. Was that with Divx?]

[edit2 - Ctitanic. It looks like you're having no problem playing a VOB right? (assuming the USB bus is turned off) Much better battery life. Is it still jerky?]

Have you had any feedback from Tablet Kiosk yet. If not, I find it amazing.
You're one of the most visible owners and they haven't bothered to contact you.
When did you last speak to them?

No-one has contact me at all apart from the very-helpful Van Smith.

Regards
Steve.

Sorry everyone - I had just had to do it.

The post count on this thread is now at 100!!

Steve.

Quote: That program has an option that they call dynamic switching. After I enabled that option the the battery drain stays lower. But yes, that 21W is when using Divx.

Quote:
WinDVD (no PowerDVD, that's a mistake at your site) is the one giving the best results. The software stops sometimes for a few seconds like buffering but still good. I think that this is due to the fact that the processor is running almost all time at 400 MHz, while in Van tests the processor was running at 600 MHz and it could handle faster these few moments when it needed more power.
I need to do some more tests today but I'm under the impression that with the right combination of software used and settings at least while playing video you will get the same results with C3 or without C3 because from what I saw yesterday the unit entered yesterday in C3 stage only for few seconds while playing the movie and only 1% (when it's idle the % goes around 80%). I'm under the impression too that playing right from the VOB is not that good because of the file sizes and high bibrate. I ripped a movie to mpeg2 today, the bibrate is around 500 and the file size is less than 1 GB (I have not checked yet exactly the size but I think is around 700 MB), I'll run a test today with that file and see if it plays better.

Quote:

They have not contact me yet. But I found a few words of Martin regarding the battery life that on that time when he said it at Gottabemobile did not have for me any meaning but now it does. Here is what he said when Rob complained about the poor battery life: Quote:

My guess is that they have not contact me or anyone because they do not have yet those BIOS modifications ready. I'm writing a note that I'll post at my blog with some of the things that I have learned from my tests. I'll post it here too.

OK confirmed then. 21W when playing a Divx. Thanks

Thanks also for error correction.

I agree that A VOB could be a very high bitrate but the hardware should be able to handle it. (Shame you cant play it on an external USB drive to double check) Your tests of a reduced MPEG-2 file will be a good one though.

Also I agree, playing a Divx with USB disabled should not make much difference at all. Using MPEG-4 (and WM9 and other advanced video codecs) will kill the battery life as it stands.
Look forward to the first UMPC with the VX700-M chipset (Mpeg4, hidef audio and WM9 hardware support!) A Samsung Q1 with a C7-M and VX700-M would be a great combo!

Looking forward to your posting.

Interesting comments from Martin BTW. I won't speculate here but there's a number of ways you can read that statement!! Hopefuly they'll get in touch with someone soon.

Steve.

In these few days that I have been playing around with the TabletKiosk eo, I have learned a few things that I want share.

First of all, I want to quote here a comment of Martin Smekal, CEO of TabletKiosk, talking to GottaBeMobile regarding battery life: "The pre-production unit you have does not have it’s power management features implemented, and there are on-going bios modifications that will effect the battery performance in the production unit. However, this being said take into consideration this is a full X86 architecture system running full Windows XP operating system, while utilizing a three (3) cell battery. A standard Tablet PC or Laptop will have at least a six (6) cell battery to achieve 3.5 hours of battery life."

My guess is that they released these units without those BIOS modifications because we still see the same or worse battery life that Rob saw in the preproduction unit. In another hand, I have found that either there is not any Power Management features implemented in these units or they have been very poorly implemented. And the reason why I said that is because during the tests we have found that when switching to some of the Power Management Profiles that are supposed to save Battery the CPU stepping feature goes off and the CPU stays at 1 GHz all the time when it's not supposed to do that. In another hand, the display brightness is preset at a very high level when the unit is running on battery and I have not found a way to set it at 25% and keep it in that way every time that I'm running on battery. From the point of view of Windows Applications, I have not found anything in the eo that can come close to the concept of "Power Management". All I have seen is what you find in Microsoft Operating System.

Add to all these that this unit is not entering into C3 stage (one of the power saving stages that could report up to 15% of more battery life) due to a bug in Microsoft Operating System that has not been properly handled by AMTek/TabletKiosk/VIA in this case. And I said "properly handled" because the problem still there, and it's a known problem by OEMs because Microsoft have been talking about it for a while.

So taking in consideration all the above, and waiting for a solution... here is some tips that will help you to add at least 10 minutes more of battery life to your eo:

• I know that many of you prefer DIVX format over other formats but... Our tests show that while playing movies in DVIX format the processor worked between 600 MHz to 1 GHz almost all the time. And the CPU load was higher. Playing movies in MPEG-2 format either copying the whole DVD into your HDD or converting the DVD to a smaller MPG is the best way to go because the video chip can decode MPEG-2 and that takes out part of the CPU Load. When using MPEG-2 files the CPU speed stayed most of the time at 400 MHz and the CPU Load was lower.
• To get more of battery life while playing an MPEG-2 movie you need a software designed to use the VN800 video chip. I tested 3 programs and the best one so far is WinDVD 7.0 (earlier version do not support the VIA chip).
• After installing Notebook Hardware Control I started to see a better battery life. There are two reasons for that. This program overwrites the Power Saving Profiles in your UMPC and forces a real stepping in the processor if the option for "Dynamic Switching" is selected. The second reason is that this program shows in the System Tray the CPU Speed, CPU Load and Battery Life. Having these meters all the time visible let you know if anything is going wrong and that gives you the chance to correct any settings before is too late.
• When you unplug the unit from power the display brightness is automatically reduced but not enough. The best results without compromising too much the visibility were obtained when the display brightness was set around 25%.

Just by doing these 3 tips I was able to add around 10 to 15 mins more to my initial 1:25 hours. I know that 1:35 is not what you were expecting but.... Hey... Something is better than nothing.

It's a clear fact for us right now that this unit is suffering from a well known and documented bug in the OS that makes the battery to drain faster. That bug can only be fixed by updating the BIOS and doing some changes in the USB drivers. That means that we will have to wait for TabletKiosk final fix.. Meanwhile following these 3 tips will help you a little bit.

One more last thing: We contacted early this week TabletKiosk showing them our support giving them all the information that we had at that moment and letting them know about this link where all the test results have been posted. They confirmed to me that they got all this info and that it was forwarded to their engineers. I have not been contacted since then so I assume that they still working in this case but so far they do not have anything to add to what we have found.

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Posted by CTitanic to ULTRA MOBILE PCs TIPS at 5/11/2006 09:34:24 AM

Well done Ctitanic.

Good summary of tips for the user.

The other issue to mention is the general bad design of the unit (in terms of power efficiency.) 21W power drain under full load is nowhere near the best of the C7-ULV laptops that are available. (they're using 1.5ghz processors and 12" screens!!.)

On the positive side, there's a lot of room for improvement and it shouldn't be too dificult to bring out a 2nd gen Eo with core improvements. For those that haven't ordered their Eo and are now considering a Q1, I would wait and see what TK have to say. Its possible they could turn around a much improved Eo in a short time. My hope is that VIA are talking to the OEM already as it's bad PR for the C7-M at the moment.

Steve.

Very bad for VIA. So far I have not seen anything appealing enough to make me buy another VIA. I bought it thinking about better battery life and so far I have not seen any of those promised results. The VIA processor performance is OK. I was expecting something very slow and I'm impressed with the speed of this unit. But from the point of view of battery life I'm really very dissapointed. From all my tests I really know that we have now a software problem. I don't think too much that it's a bad hardware design. I think that if they change the BIOS and adjust the drivers and add a good power managment software this unit can reach easily from 2.2 to 2.5 hours.

Unfortunately, its a bad software and hardware design. None of what we're seeing is attributable to VIA.

By changing the BIOS to correctly support or utilise the VIA C7 you should see 2.2-2.5hrs (idle) I agree.
But it will do nothing to improve the situation at high loads. (OK, you might be able to squeeze 10% more out of the battery with some BIOS tweaks.)

The very high-load drain of 18-21W is purely atributeable to inneficient OEM design and only the OEM can fix that in later versions. (But putting it all into perspective with Desktops running at 250W, we shouldnt forget that even 21W of drain is a great step forward for portable devices.)

To make you feel a bit better about the C7-M, don't forget the Van Smith hardware review which shows what is possible with the VIA.

Quote:

Reviews results like this are the reason I beleive that the VIA C7 is technically the best choice for a UMPC.

Regards
Steve.

Let's put it in this way. I see your point, I know that you are right but I do not want to believe it.

JKK, the owner of the AMTek T700 that reports better battery life, has spoken with Martin Smekal, CEO of TabletKiosk, and gave him the information to find out the production batch of that unit. Comparing batches probably will help to find out what is different between that unit and those sold by TabletKiosk that have worse battery life.

Source: John Tokash's Blog

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Posted by CTitanic to ULTRA MOBILE PCs TIPS at 5/18/2006 11:59:07 AM

The Samsung Q1 has a BT USB device and the processor in entering all the time to C3 Stage. I have some Q1 owners running some tests for me here. And they reported that having the BT ON and Connected to a headset the processor was still entering in C3 state. In general the Q1 is always running in C3 state even when they are using it in no cpu high demanding tasks. That explains why the Samsung Q1 has a better battery life.

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Posted by CTitanic to ULTRA MOBILE PCs TIPS at 5/18/2006 02:24:02 PM


This is good news for us. Today in the morning I thought for a moment that just having the WiFi USB adapter and BT USB adapter integrated was going to be a big engineering mistake that wont allow the processor to enter in C3 state and as result that issue was not going be fixed ever. But know, after these results from Q1 tests it's clear to me that having or using these USB adaptors is not preventing the processor for entering in C3 state. So basically, it's a driver issue guys, and yes, it can be fixed by software. The proof is right there in all the Q1s currently in the market.