Blurred lines: Android e-ink mobe claims TWO-WEEK battery life Chinese handset manufacturer Onyx has announced the 3G OnyxPhone E43, a mobile-phone-cum-e-reader, claiming a whopping two weeks on its 1800mAh battery. The e-ink smartphone has a 4.3-inch display which dramatically improves battery life. How long it lasts will of course depend on how much you use it; e-ink only uses power …
with no apps and internet then the battery life will be good.
On the principle of "more is better" and extrapolating from your advice to go back in time for an answer to the vexing battery life conundrum, Mr Coward, I reactivated my Motorola TAC analogue phone from 1995.
Coverage was sparse, the contract was usurious and for all that I got a battery talk life of 15 minutes.
So much for the knowledge base of Register Commentators.
You do save battery life, if OLED is only occasionally on.
Frankly, Android seems odd choice for mobile phone with e-ink screen. I would think that "dumb" user interface would be better, since there would be less to interact with (e-ink screens are not very good at "interaction", as in "bit slow").
There are plenty of (dumb) mobiles out there where the battery will last a week or longer. that despite the battery being a lot smaller than on a smartphone. It's the display and the high-power smartphone CPU and software that eats the battery faster than the radio, with one caveat. That is, you're in a good mobile signal area. Moving from a 4-bar area to a one-bar area cuts the battery life of my dumb phone from about a week to around a day, and that's before I use it as a phone.
It's not the radio - per se - I think. 2G and 3G radios are actually quite efficient, it's all the apps within the phone that are constantly *using* the radio. My wife and I have recently acquired Moto G phones. Our first ever Android devices and we're not entirely happy, *but* my wife can manage 10 days on a battery charge and I usually manage 6 or 7. Not one of the reviewers we read managed more than 2 or 3 and for why? We have turned off (and disabled) all the twittering apps, the tracking apps, the "please tell Google exactly what I'm doing, where, every minute of every day" apps, the apps which tell you when your Facebooking friends(*) upload a new photograph of themselves sitting on the train and the other data-allowance-wasting apps(+).
So these apps are not constantly calling home, or using the GPS, or sucking data from next-door's WiFi, and so the radios (for there are many in a modern phone) can sit idle for most of the time. On top of that the 4-core processor can power down and slow down most of the time, just keeping enough going to listen for genuine communications from real people - i.e. telephone calls and text messages.
We don't make loads of calls, though we do text a fair bit. The main difference between my use and my wife's is probably that I use the web browser a bit more often. We've disabled Chrome and use Opera (yes, yes, I know the latest version is based on the same engine) but at least Opera stays out of your way when you don't want it and can reduce the amount of data per web page. We do take occasional photographs and video.
10 days would be about average for that use on a 2G or 3G "feature phone" - which is what we have always had previously - and while the G obviously does use more power (it's battery is about twice the capacity of most featurephone batteries) it isn't anywhere near as bad as people suggest.
I can't wait for the day when we no longer have to listen to Radio 4 presenters asking us to "tweet" the programme, or "follow it on Facebook" and that day will surely come, just as the day came when it was no longer considered mandatory to have a fax number or (before that) a telex address.
Old fogey? Me?
(*)Come to think of it, I can't actually name any friends who *do* use Facebook, or who tweet regularly.
(+)we have a 250MB monthly data allowance and rarely use more than a fifth of that. I had a phone bill today; £18 (inc VAT) for the two phones. £6 a month rental (+VAT) and a few extra bits.
" We have turned off (and disabled) all the twittering apps, the tracking apps, the "please tell Google exactly what I'm doing, where, every minute of every day" apps, the apps which tell you when your Facebooking friends(*) upload a new photograph of themselves sitting on the train and the other data-allowance-wasting apps(+).
So these apps are not constantly calling home, or using the GPS, or sucking data from next-door's WiFi, and so the radios (for there are many in a modern phone) can sit idle for most of the time. On top of that the 4-core processor can power down and slow down most of the time, just keeping enough going to listen for genuine communications from real people - i.e. telephone calls and text messages."
Damm right.
But what about the yoof and their constant need to know who/what/why/where/when how all their real and fapbook friends are every millisecond?
(No personally I don't give a f**k either, but htey are quite big buyers of this stuff).
When people write up embedded Linux and "1 second boot" systems the #1 common power drain seems to be the backlight on the screen. Figures of 5W seem to be quite common.
Despite this AFAIK no mfg lets you turn it completely off.
Of course doing so would mean phone mfgs would recognize that frankly no one gives a s**t about their UI until they need to make/receive a phone call.
I have an HTC Desire running Android 2.2 and if I turn off mobile data and wifi the battery lasts ages - easily a week. That's with occasional use as a "dumb phone" and light app usage (like game play). Turn them back on and I have to recharge every day. It is NOT the screen.
However, the Russian device with eInk on the back (http://yotaphone.com/#/en/) is a great idea because then I could dump my mobile boarding QR code on it and not worry about whether the phone has turned off and locked the screen when approaching the security and gate checkpoints when flying.
Because (in the UK at least,) mobile phone networks charge through the nose for 'mobile data' sims for use in 3G dongles. You can get much better deals by getting a sim intended for a phone that allows tethering. The downside is that some networks will give you trouble if you use a phone sim in a 3G dongle.
Citation: BBC Click talks to University of Cambridge department of engineering.
But I agree it was a sweeping statement.
Well, maybe but primarily because it's because the media is paged anyway and useful for the TOC and index and also because the eye copes much better with page turning than it does with scrolling. We only suffer with on web browsers because too few manufacturers have got round to implementing paged media extensions and have been pissing around with things like CSS regions instead!
Where are they? I remember reading a while ago about colour e-ink and higher refresh rates that might help increase battery life. Since then I've seen nothing and it's still the same black and white displays everywhere with AMOLED, LCD etc being used mostly. Has it all been forgotten about or am I missing it?
The issue is that people have accepted the poor battery life of LCD based solutions, because for other than 'reading novels' they want 'I can watch a movie on it'.
Color e-ink readers have been utterly killed by inexpensive tablets.
(They exist, but you're looking at about $500 for a jetBook 2, and the color isn't all that great.)
It's getting hard to find a black and white e-ink reader with physical buttons. The touchscreen Kindle drives me absolutely insane. I don't know what I'll do when my Cybook Opus eventually gives up the ghost.
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