Last August I did a quick overview and a few calculations on the OLPC battery life using some stats that were lying around. I calculated 10 hours battery life.
I was wrong. According to a Linux Today report quoting Michalis Bletsas, Chief Connectivity Officer for the OLPC project, the MAXIMUM drain on the OLPC is 5W. The minimum active-OLPC drain is an incredible 350mw. If you sat down with the OLPC to read an e-book in black and white mode, you’d have a good 24 hours before you’d have to get the Yo-Yo charging unit out. I guess, you could actually put a solar panel on the back of it and it would charge enough during the day to last all night. It would never ever run out of power.
Lets compare this to the what I believe is the most power-efficient notebook PC in the world – The Kohjinsha SA1.
The Kohjinsha uses a 30w/hour battery and will run a pretty impressive 3.5 hours playing a movie and if you use it as an e-book you’ll get over 5 hours with the WiFi off. While browsing, you get up to 4 hours which equates to about 8W drain. The OLPC uses about 1/3 of that power in the same scenario.
How?
Well, its using a 377Mhz AMD Geode processor for a start. A slightly lower-performance version of the 533Mhz one that’s in the Kohjinsha, the Pepper Pad 3 and the Raon Digital Vega. It also has a very efficient WiFi radio and a flash drive too but the main reason for the low-power drain is the screen. It really is an amazing bit of kit. If you haven’t read about it yet, take a look here. In summary its got two modes. An active backlit mode that drains about 1W (compared to 3-5W on a UMPC) and a non-backlit transflective (requires ambient light) mode in black and white that drains about 0.1W (zero point one.)
Its a ray of light for ultra mobile PC users and shows just what is possible.
Here’s one scenario to ponder. Who’s going to be first in line to use some of the technology? What if that organisation creates a slick new design, an efficient ‘thin’ software layer and tacked on a few million of these onto the production run? What if they dedicated a top bar to contextual advertising? With a life of 5 years, it might just pay for that organisation to give them away free. Did you know that Google are a major partner in the OLPC project? Bring on the Google Switch Mesh!
Via OLPCNews
Steve
