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 ultra mobile PC 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!

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.

Breakdown, tips and summary follow…

Read the full story

Energy efficiency is, without a doubt, the most important design factor for any pocketable Ultra Mobile device. On Friday this week, there are two very important launch events taking place that will highlight the advances made in energy efficient computing over the last year. The two devices will also show how us close Intel and ARM partners really are in the race to provide handheld, Internet-focused computers. MIDs.

On one side of the fence, in PC land, Sharp and Willcom will release a pocketable slider-keyboard mobility-focused device. The Sharp Willcom D4 will be running Windows Vista on the Intel Silverthorne/Poulsbo platform also known as Menlow and is likely to be one of the most energy-efficient 3G-enabled PC’s so far.

On the other side of the fence, in smartphone land, Apple will release a smaller, 3G-capable mobility-focused device running a highly optimised desktop operating system. The iPhone 3G will be running ARM-based processors and is likely to be one of the most energy-efficient 3G smartphones so far.

The Willcom D4 is said to have (independent tests) a 3G-active time (Internet activity) of around 1.5 hours and it runs a 7wh battery.

The iPhone 3G is said to have (Apple figures) a 3G-active time (Internet activity) of around 5 hours and it is likely to run (my estimates) a battery of about 5.5wh.

3G-active Internet time is a worst-case measure of device efficiency so, based on these early figures, it looks like the Menlow-based device will use about 4.5W and an iPhone will use about 1W.  More after the pic…

Read the full story

Jkk of Jkkmobile has unearthed battery figures for the new Atom based Eee 901. Conflicting with the rumored 7 hours of battery life, the official figures are 4.2-6 hours for the 6 cell 6600 mAh (48wh) battery. Jkk also reports that the 901’s batteries will not be compatible with previous Eee models. Weight of the unit will also increase over the older Eee 900; head over to Jkkmobile for additional pictures and weight info .

Doody, A nickname I feel I’ve mentioned before in the last few weeks, has been testing the MSI Wind and logged the whole series of tests in the MSI-Wind forums. The tests results include a hard-disk test, PCMark 05, 3D Mark 03 and a battery life test.

The hard disk transfer speeds look very good in comparison to devices with 1.8" drives and that means that with XP, application load-times should be fairly swift. The battery life was measured while doing all the benchmarking and represents an extreme scenario. 2 hrs and 19 minutes. In general, adding 30% to a full-load test result like this will give you the real in-use battery life which in this case is 3 hours. Not exactly the leap-forward in battery life that some people were expecting but in-line with our expectations. Considering that the netbook platform of Diamondville/954 chipset is very much the same as the Stealey/945 chipset seen on 2007 UMPCs, its no real surprise. If you were to add a 10" screen and 2.5" drive to a Q1 Ultra, you’d also be up at near 10W average drain.

I haven’t been able to analyse the PCMark results yet because i’ve asked Doody to see if he can run the CrystalMark test which will give us a good breakdown and like-for-like comparison with the results that Ctitanic keeps track of.

The MSI-Wind continues to be the #1 most-viewed device on UMPCPortal. Details and specifications in the product page here.

VIa small-laptops

Source: MSI-Wind.net

To know that there’s a commercially available solar-powered mobile phone gives me a lot of inspiration and encouragement that one day in the near future we’ll be able to design UMPCs with infinite standby capability. You could have a panel and electronics that senses light levels and keeps the device in standby (or even turned on) when there’s enough ambient light. When the light levels drop below a threshold for a certain amount of time (based on remaining battery life perhaps), the device would drop into hibernation.

The mobile phone shown here is produced by HiTech Wealth and is available in China for $510. Full news story at SolSie.