My personal lower limit for battery life on a mobile device is three hours. When I tested the OQO and got just 2hrs, I was disappointed. Since then I’ve been doing some cleaning, tweaking and testing and I’m now able to give you my results.
The OQO 2+ can reach just under 3hrs of constant online action after tweaks. The tweaks I’ve done are not difficult and most people will be familiar with them. Number 1 tweak is to run the device in power saving battery mode. The CPU is locked to 800mhz in this mode but Vista is still surprisingly usable, probably due to the fast ssd and hyperthreading that you don’t get in 800mhz Atom CPUs. The second tweak is to drop the backlight to about 50%. The brightness at this level is enough for a daylight room. The third tweak is to set the fan settings to ‘quiet’. By doing this you reduce the amount of time that the fan is on although there is a school of thought that says it would be better to keep the components cool so maybe this one need more testing.
There are other tweaks that could be performed too but I haven’t got into those yet but for the meantie, its looking acceptable. Not good, just acceptable. Considering the speed of standby on this device and the tiny size of the spare batteries, I think OQO have made the right trade-offs with size, weight and battery life and the really wonderful thing is that if you need it, you can dial a lot of power in leaving the choice to the end user. Desktop power or mobile battery life all-in-one.
(Note. 3hrs is the maximum figure. Careless use of heavy flash-based web pages can reduce this figure quickly down to 2.5hrs or less. Imm also doing test to see just how power efficient the OLED screen is.)
I’m surprised you need the screen at 50%. Before my screen turned yellow/green my old 02 always had the screen brightness set to one click above off and it was fine for everything except outdoors.
Care to tell us more about the yellow/green? :(
That screen is like $500-600 to have it repaired/replaced :(
A few months ago my screen turned this awful yellow/green colour. I’ve been told it’s probably the ribbon cable that needs replacing but it could be the screen.
John,
Kanske kolla med trevor kanske han har något han kan sälja dig? :)
http://www.oqotalk.com/index.php/topic,2888.msg24597.html
If these tweaks give you a max of 3 hours of constant web browsing, then what do you estimate is the battery life with wifi or 3G off? I connect only when I need to on a mobile device and even then not for more than 15-20 minutes. My main uses for a mid or umpc are offline so I’m curious if I can squeeze out a little more battery life.
Sounds a little hard to estimate, I guess and hope what Chippy could do is run more tests with wireless IN use and then some with it off, from there you might be able to estimate your own aprox battery time?
With BT only and with the above tweaks I estimate another 15-20 minutes but no more than that.
And without any BT? BT does want a fair amount of power too, well at least in a mobile phone perspective. You’re the one with the watts and wh numbers in your head, not me :)
BTW on that subject am I estimating things somewhat correctly if I say the OQO 2+ want 1.5x to 2x more power than the Aigo based on your 4W comment from here http://www.solar-umpc.com/
Chippy do you see any REAL steps within the UMPC/MID market within the next year or two either within battery/solar solutions?
No battery charger for the Nokia? Just my point too. Why don’t these portable device folks get on the stick and come up with a standard battery design – like AA or AAA, to use in all devices. Then someone who is portable, who is in a pinch, can buy a standard battery that is something quick off the shelf to use IN ANY DEVICE if they want. Of course, they should think about the environment when they come up with this standard battery. A suggestion for a battery is as follows:
The Environmental Implications of…
http://www.bigthink.com/science-technology/the-environment/11930
quote: “The batteries can’t explode, right? I mean pick your company. They have recalls about every six months of millions of batteries that are exploding using lithium ion technology and so we explored different technology and batteries that would last much longer”.
” The typical lithium ion battery lasts some 500 charge/recharge cycles, which is if you’re running off a battery all the time, a year or a year and a half, two years. Well, ours lasts 2,000 charge/recharge cycles and so that’s like five years, right, even if you’re running off a battery all the time and lithium ferro phosphate which we use as well as nickel metal hydride, lithium ferro phosphate actually with processing decomposes into fertilizer”.
Why not? AND a universal charger would work on any battery then and we don’t have the waste of all those ORPHANED battery chargers (some that really mess up a trip because they get left at home at times) but all of them, they are useless in a short time and THEY ALL end up in landfills and the waste stream as well.
Where is the standard that is what folks want that is universal, and is also at the same time environmentally friendly?
Along the same lines (let’s get a solution) but from another angle (less is more :)).
This was news now over TWO YEARS (soon 2.5yrs) ago: http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/18/two-way-oled-displays-to-provide-solar-power/
Still nothing on the consumer market, AFAIK along these lines, not the flexibility but the fact of a screen doubling as a solar panel. Anyone know any efficiency numbers for these? Yeah I’m sure Google can find it for me :)
Oh I ran across a “JKK edition” of the 02 :)
http://community.research.microsoft.com/blogs/alpineinker/archive/2008/04/04/faux-oqo-with-origami.aspx
Just nitpicking but OLED screens don’t actually use a backlight. Each pixel produces its own light.
That is why a dark theme on an OLED screen should give you an extra few minutes of battery life!
“CPU is locked to 800mhz in this mode but Vista is still surprisingly usable”
Interesting that the 1.33GHz Atom in devices like the Kohjinsha and Vaio P is so often criticized for being a poor match for Vista then…
I put it down to the SSD disk which is twice as fast on the oqo compared to others ive tested. You wouldnt want use it as a desktop at this speed but its still not bad.
New article: Update on OQO 2+ battery life. http://bit.ly/cRNhLq