Firstly, I need to point out that Tec-City are manufacturers so you won’t be able to buy these products from Tec-City as a consumer. If you’re a reseller or distributor though, you might want to take a look because they have some good solutions and, clearly evident through my discussions with them about solar solutions, a lot of knowledge.
You might recognise some of the products here. Tekkeon and TabletKiosk have used them. I used one on my Solar-UMPC tour too and was very happy with it until I killed it one day.
The two products that I highlight in the video are the MP3450E and the MP2300.
If you’re a reseller or distributor looking for a good quality power bank solution, take a closer look at Tec-City. If you’re a reseller or distributor that carries these products, please contact us and we’ll link you in to this article.
Ultimate-Netbook, a big accessory retailer based in Europe, has just announced a 10% discount code (Psst – Use the offer code WEBUMPC to get the discount) for our readers so now would probably be the best time to tell you about two Ultimate-Netbook products that I’ve had for a while. A universal power pack and a universal car mount. For anyone into mobile computing, these two products are well worth considering.
This thought popped into my head today for no reason what-so-ever and I wanted to see if I could get a discussion started.
Imagine this: One year ago, there was a huge battery breakthrough. All of your mobile tech gadgets have a battery that is good for an entire day of computing. I’m not talking about what a big company calls “all day computing” (maybe 8 hours?), I mean 24 hours of continuous use on a single charge no matter what task you are doing.
Now answer these two questions:
How would your current computing habits be different (other than ‘work longer’)?
Two years down the road, what would gadgets evolve into, knowing that they were designed with all day battery life in mind?
When you are done, tag some people who you’d like to hear thoughts from.
Allow me to start:
How would your current computing habits be different?
First of all I think I would remove all of the wireless radio toggle software from my devices. Why turn them off if we have the power? Second, I might carry a more powerful device as my pocket computer. I would probably use the UX180 in place of my current iPhone, knowing that I could get more done on the 180. There probably wouldn’t be much need to turn my devices off so I would have an always online status. Services like Google Latitude would be active on my devices so friends could see me and I could see them. I used to carry my UX around in my pockets, but I also needed to bring the AC adapter with me.
Two years down the road, what would gadgets evolve into knowing that they were designed with all day battery life in mind?
I think that smaller devices that would function as notifies would become popular. Envision a normal looking wrist watch, that has 3G connectivity and GPS, aggregating all of your notifications (email, IM, social networks, etcetera) and tells you what is going on right then, without having to pull something out of your pocket. I imagine a vibration from the watch letting me know that a friend is nearby (located with something like Google Latitude), and clicking a button on the side of the phone at that time would connect via Bluetooth to my phone and call my nearby friend. The watch would display other short info like micro-blog updates or SMS from my phone right on its own screen. I think that HD content would be much more prevalant, given that even handheld cameras would be powerful enough to do all day HD recording. This might have an affect on demand for faster bandwidth because people would be flocking to YouTube to be uploading or watching lots of HD videos, and they would want to do it with the same speed that they are used to watching SD videos.
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:
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:
I think it’s fair to say that if you use a smartphone like a MID, it isn’t going to last long. My N82 lasts for about three hours; less if I’m using 3G. The iPhone, about 4 hours under heavy use and the Android-based G1 seems to be even worse. The fact is that radios and processing take energy and although your smartphone will sit doing nothing for days on end, once you start using it connected over Wifi or 3G, the clock starts ticking.
There are ways around the problem and, to a certain extent, you can change your usage pattern to help the situation. Picking up emails, sending a few messages and then disconnecting is common practice but it’s not exactly Web2.0 is it! If you want to stay connected and keep services open for real-time internet applications you’re down in the battery-life danger zone. There are a few exceptions of course in the smartphone world but on the whole, it’s only because the battery is big. The Nokia E90 has a 5wh battery. The Athena has an 8wh battery.
I’m not saying that smartphones are poor, I’m just saying that we’re moving to the point where both smartphones and MIDs are requiring big batteries for hardcore web use and that means that fitting them in your pocket becomes a problem.
Do you use your smartphone in an always-connected and active mode? If so, what is your experience. Have you had to reduce your internet usage to preserve battery for voice usage? Do you carry spare batteries. How about a spare phone? Or do you just wait until you are able to pull out your laptop? Let us know about your smartphone battery life experiences in the comments below. Oh, one last thing. Check out this monster battery pack for the G1…It’s as big as the battery in an Aigo MID and makes the G1 almost as big as an Aigo MID!
Admittedly, its not difficult to imagine a scenario where less CPU cycles result in less power drain and this method isn’t going to magically extend your battery life by much but its nice to see the theory tested to the extreme.
SecTheory.com took a notebook PC, a couple of browsers and measured the battery drain on the Top 100 Alexa sites. They then took the worst offenders, that is, the ones that took the most power drain, and blocked script and ads using NoScript and AdBlock Plus. The results were quite significant. On a Dell Inspiron B130 notebook, with a 1.5GHz Celeron M processor and 1 Gig of ram, running fully patched Windows XP SP2, the power consumption when browsing the worst offending sites dropped by 11W, a 20% reduction. If its a 25W TDP CPU we’re talking about here, I can believe the results because browsing website has grown to be a very CPU intensive task.
The effect would be much less on netbooks and UMPCs but I would expect the same test to save 1W average which is about 10% - about 15 minutes for a device with a standard battery. Of course, its not really normal to be picking the worst offending sites and continuously hitting them either. Under normal browsing use, you probably wouldn’t notice any difference but there’s something else you need to be aware of.
Script not only takes CPU and battery life, it takes time. Time to execute, render and in some cases, time to fetch the remote code. By disabling script you significantly improve browsing speeds on low power devices and by definition, you save battery life. I tried it a few weeks ago with the noscript plugin and I’ve seen many comments on UMPCPortal from users that also use the technique. It really works! You lock yourself out of application sites like Google reader initially but it doesn’t take any effort to enable exceptions for these sites as you go along. No more hung page loads waiting for remote sites to time out. No more of those terribly annoying auto-start video ads that make browsing on a low-end PC a misery. There’s even an improvement in security. Its a win-win-win!
Try it. Install the noscript plugin and see how you get on. Yes, I risk killing all of my advertising income if everyone does this on all their devices and I’m sure there are bloggers out there that will read this and cringe but I trust you’ll only use it on your netbooks and umpcs and put the exception in for your favorite sites! Long live the choice between simple html and web2.0!
Laptop Magazine have taken the testing a step further and pushed the NC10 to the absolute limit by dropping in an SSD and disabling the BT radio on their web browsing tests. The result…nearly 8 hours of surfing at minimum brightness.
While this may not be the best of real-life tests, it shows that the underpinnings are efficient and that’s exactly what you need on a mobile device.
The NC10 shouldn’t just be crowned the best netbook out there, it should be crowned the best consumer laptop out there. 10" and an Atom 1.6Ghz is good enough for 9/10 consumers so expect it to eat well into 12 and even 15.4" low-end laptop sales.
I’ve already posted about this, twice. Samsung have some great engineers.
I had the chance to look at an NC10 (#1 device on the portal right now) at the netbook meeting in Cologne on Saturday and the first thing I did was to measure the minimum drain of the device. Within minutes, I was seeing a fantastic sub-5W minimum drain.
This is lower than on most UMPCs and is a good indication that the electronics on the motherboard, the power components and the screen are well engineered. There’s no point putting in a low-power CPU if you’re going to lose the advantage it with crappy engineering. Take the Kohjinsha SC3. It uses the latest, lower clock, lower power CPU and chipset and yet even after hours of optimising, the base drain on it is no less than 7.5W. That’s 50% more than the, much bigger NC10 that doesn’t even use the low power CPU and chipset.
Battery life outweighs most requirements for me so considering that everything else on the device is up to scratch, I’m seriously thinking of getting a black NC10 as my only laptop and selling the M912 and Medion Akoya. They’re both excelent devices but neither of them are as well engineered as the NC10
One of the distributors of the Wibrain i1 has got hold of a Wibrain i1, snapped a few pics and made some comments in the forum here. If you’re looking the the ultimate Windows XP mobility device with the best battery life and best connectivity for, potentially, a very interesting price, keep reading.
The 1.3Ghz Atom-based device is based on the old Wibrain B1 design which was, quite frankly, an ugly brick to most people. There are some styling improvements which help it a little but don’t expect young geeks to be fainting at your feet when you whip it out. However, this is an action UMPC, not a flowery style-icon. It has the same easy-to-learn control layout (the touchpad is the best I’ve ever tried on a UMPC for example) and the same extremely high quality and brightness screen in a package that weighs 500gm. That’s 1.1lbs. It runs XP, has a 60GB hard drive, new SD card slot and re-positioned USB port. The real kicker is three-pronged though. 6hrs+ battery life on the standard 30wh battery, a 3G module and what looks like it could be an amazingly good price for such a setup.
Wibrain claim 7hrs on the standard battery. I’ve seen 6+ on the battery meter in hands-on testing and ‘Digital’, is now reporting 6.5hrs with wifi or 3G on. In marketing terms, this is an all-day UMPC in 500gms.
Final availability is still not 100% clear but early pricing indications at Mobilx look positive. 467 Euros ($600) pre tax without 3G and 532 Euros ($712) pre-tax with the 3G module. We’ll keep you updated on availability when we hear anything.
Remember my in-tent Samsung Q1 Ultra test? 9hrs battery life on the Samsung Q1 with 25% backlight? An average drain of 6.9 watts. It was impressive and since I blew up the Q1 Ultra doing some solar-charging tests, I’ve been missing those 5, 6 and 7hr figures. I was just getting over the trauma until I read this article about another Samsung Mobile product with great battery life.
Notebook Magazine have just done a full set of battery life tests on the NC10 Netbook and it looks like Samsung have once again worked their magic. The tests included continuous Wifi-on web browsing in battery saving mode which is a very reasonable test to be doing. Far better than the misleading 2001 Jeita test and much more ‘real-life’ than the Battery Eater Pro ‘turn everything and and run it at full-steam’ approach. The NC10 returned…
12% screen brightness: 7hrs 34mins representing an average drain of about 7.6w which is just a little bit more than what I saw on the Q1 Ultra.
50% screen brightness, the duration dropped to 6hrs 30mins which is an average 8.7W.
100% screen brightness, the test result reduced to 4hrs 38 minutes which is 12.3 watts drain.
I recall seeing this solution a while back on JKKMobile but Paul from MoDaCo has now got one for testing. Its a 47Wh battery pack for the HTC Shift from Mugen which should allow about 5hrs online time thus solving one of the HTC Shift’s biggest problems. It’s a tidy solution but at nearly $240, it’s a huge amount to pay for 5 hrs of computing time.
Kevin C. Tofel over at JKotR has spent some time benchmarking the 6-cell extended battery for the MSI Wind. I have to say, I’m really impressed. Using BatteryEater, Kevin was getting 3 hours and 39 minutes running the minimum runtime test, which uses the CPU at 100% capacity until the battery dies. Running the test a 50% screen brightness, Wi-Fi on, and no Windows power management, it is easy to how a regular work load could give you nearly 5 hours of runtime. Kevin also ran BatteryEater after toggling the Wind’s ‘Turbo’ button, which cuts the CPU speed in half. Running at 800MHz, the Wind went for an impressive 4 hours and 59 minutes under full CPU strain. Kevin says that with regular usage and power management, you could hit 7 hours with the extended battery. Head over to JKotR to see the full article including a comparison to the Asus Eee 1000H.
I’m in the ‘BUX (as my fellow US-based bloggers say!) with the SC3 and having a fun, productive time. Watching that battery level of course but really enjoying the form factor. To most people round here I guess it looks like ‘one of those small notebooks’ but they are so so wrong!
Things you can’t do with a netbook..but can with an SC3.
Thumb the keyboard. Yup, it feels comfortable for one-lines, IM, passwords and URLs.
Hold it in one hand and drive it via the touch screen while leaning back.
Leaning back with a coffee in one hand and the SC3 converted to tablet mode reading feeds in the other.
Slipping it into my ‘man purse.’ [Yes, a debateable advantage ]
Bluetooth teathering to my phone (OK, some netbooks do actually have Bluetooth)
Feeling really happy that you have one of the smallest and most adaptable PC formats ever.
Problems you must cope with…
Battery life
Keyboard not as good as a netbook but im happy to sacrifice a handful of words per minute.
Vista keeps slowing me down with its disk activity and inability to be slim and fast. I checked out an XP-based 1.33Ghz Silverthorne-based device this morning. It was so much better.
I have decided to give the SC3 another chance. My Tekkeon and Samsung Q1U died last week so rather than shell out $1400 for my ideal Q1 Ultra, i’m going to get a slim, 30hw external battery pack that will fit in my gadget bag and provide some badly needed energy. When I get the chance, i’ll try out the Kohjinsha extended battery. It should save me $1000 while I wait for a new device. In the meantime i’ll have to put up with the rollercoaster of emotions that the SC3 gives me. 2hrs mobile happiness followed by massive frustration that device is unuseable without mains power! A bit like the HTC Shift but with a much, much better screen.
[Note about that rollewrcoaster: I was tethering to my N82 rather than using WiFi to save battery power and the battery on my phone died before I had a chance to post this. Battery life, battery life, battery life. Grrr!]
Last week I posted some tips on how to squeeze 3 hrs browsing time out of the Kohjinsha SC3. The method was a bit of a trick as it utilised a mobile phone data connection over Bluetooth but it was the only way to achieve 3 hours on the 20wh battery. It equates to an average 7W drain which is, even in UMPC terms, very efficient but it’s not as good as I hoped from a Z-series Atom-based system.
The reason why it’s not as good as I expected (and the reason why i’m not using the SC3 to write this post in my tent while the rain beats down outside) is that the Samsung Q1 Ultra (with SSD mod) is just as efficient with the previous generation Intel platform. As I write this post, perfom (try it, start->run->perfmon. Its fun to watch the battery drain) is telling me that the average drain is 6.9 watts. Meebo is running in the background, Friendfeed is updating, CPU utilisation is averaging 20%, brightness is set at 25% and I’ve got a LED lamp attached to the USB port to give me some light. With the standard battery, thats over 4 hours of online time. I’ve got the extended battery here which is showing 5.5 hrs @ 61% battery. (9hrs total)
With a refresh to a 1.33Ghz Atom processor and some tweaks to the motherboard, I’m sure Samsung could shave 20% off that drain figure and produce a 5-6 hr, 600gm device. They’ve proved themselves as one of the best at electronic design with their Q1 products and it excites me to think about what they might come up with next - as long as it has a lighted keyboard!
I’m going camping over the next four days. Here’s the kit that’s going to keep me productive.
[The Wife and little-one have planned a last-minute camping trip together and I was due to stay home and work but I've decided to go along and make a working holiday of it. Dads - this is the beauty of Ultra Mobile PC's!!!]
Whats the minimum battery life you consider to be suitable for an Ultra Mobile device in 2008?
If it wasn’t clear before, it is now. [If the results are not showing, make your vote and you'll see them.]
While some people will accept 3-hours battery life for an Ultra Mobile PC, 85% of people want 4 or more hours. 50% of people here see 5 hours as minimum battery life for a UMPC.
As you might have read, I have been very disappointed with the battery life figures on the Kohjinsha SC3. I was expecting a lot lot more from an Ultra Mobile PC built on Intel’s latest battery-optimised Menlow platform but it turns out that under normal use, this device is just as bad as many devices based on the previous platform. Over the last 24 hours I’ve spent a lot of time trying to analyse why and have finally come up with the reason. Invetec, the OED for this device, have cut corners. While the background drain (on the motherboard and power board) is better than on previous Kohjinsha’s, it’s no better than the HTC Shift, Q1 Ultra. All these devices can match the SC3 for background efficiency. About 4W minimum or 5-hours, is what you can expect with everything turned off but the processor.
OK, 4W is good but once the screen is on, boom! Up goes the battery drain by between 80 and 150%. This is exceptionally high drain for what appears to be a LED-backlit screen. Thank goodness that using the screen in a bright room requires only 3/8th brightness but it’s still about 3W of drain which is much higher than it should be.
The second shock comes when you turn the VIA, yes VIA!, USB Wifi module on. Connecting to a hotspot will push the drain up by over 3W. It will settle back to 2W after connection but this is, quite frankly, pathetic. A wifi module that takes more power than the processor is a joke. There are far more efficient Wifi modules out there. Did Inventec think they were designing a cheap netbook?
So from a background drain of 5W, if you want to surf the net in a bright room over Wifi, the battery life drops to a depressing 2hrs. This is an average drain of 10W which is no better than the devices mentioned above.
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