I’m ready to consider an 11.6 or even a 12 inch screen now and its based on my requirement to run some more complex software on a device that has a higher resolution. The problem is, while I can bear a bigger footprint, I can’t bear much more weight.
My Gigabyte Touchnote with its Runcore SSD and 2GB upgrade has served me well for 2 years but with the extended battery I’m down to 4hrs so it really is time to think about something new. The Touchnote weighs 1.45KG in its current form and there’s no way I want to go above that; In fact I’m looking to get as close as I can to 1KG. I’m also looking to stay with ‘just enough’ CPU which keeps the price down and allows me to stay in the low-power, long-battery life bracket. For me though, ‘just enough’ means dual-core Atom N550/N570 or AMD C-50 and if I consider my video editing project, it could be higher than that.
As I look at devices like the ASUS EeePC 1015PN and the Samsung NC210 I see Windows Starter, 1GB and 1024×600 screens but weights below 1.25KG. There’s also the AMD C-50-based Toshiba NB550D and the EeePC 1015b which at 1.3KG offers 2GB and, we hope, Windows options. The Fujitsu Lifebook PH530 is an interesting 1.33KG option with Core i3 and an 11.5 inch screen but in the 12 inch range you really are looking at 1.5KG unless you are prepared to pay serious money.
With my Android tablet PC taking over some of my netbook work now (many of my shorter posts last week were done with the Galaxy Tab) I’m not worried about having 8hr battery life. A solid 4-5hrs is fine so perhaps that means I can go up with the CPU and down with the battery life.
I get the feeling that there are a lot of you out there that are in the same position. You’ve had your netbook for a year or two and you’re looking for another mobile productivity solution. So what’s your preference? Do you want to keep it small or light? Do you want to break out of the Intel netbook restrictions or are you happy to carry on inside their restrictions? Feel free to comment below and of course, if you have buying tips, lets hear them.
About 3 months ago I bought a Toshiba AC100 ‘smart’ book for testing. While I didn’t believe it would provide me with a netbook experience I was very interested in continuing my testing with ‘always on’ ARM-based devices. Unfortunately, that ‘always on’ experience highlighted in marketing and videos, has still not been delivered 3 months later. It’s time Toshiba actually stood up, removed the false claims, started apologizing to customers and fixing this broken device. More importantly, potential owners need to keep fingers off until we can confirm the problem is fixed.
We highlighted the standby battery life problem just a few days after we got the AC100 and a few weeks later delivered the message direct to Toshiba at IFA. The product simply doesn’t provide anywhere near the claimed ‘up to 8 days’ of standby battery life. You’ll be lucky if the AC100 still has a charge 24 hours later. Many many users have confirmed the same issue.
A promised upgrade to Froyo was the light at the end of the tunnel that most owners clung on to but that is now many weeks overdue with no official word about a timescale. In fact, a surprise firmware update last week that failed to install was followed by another firmware update that doesn’t seem to have fixed the problem or updated the device to Froyo. Do you trust them to deliver 2.2 AND fix the battery life problem?
In attempts to actually get something useful out of the AC100 I hacked the bootloader (yes, forgoing any rights to a return or repair under guarantee) to install Ubuntu and after trying the update a few days ago, I now have a bricked device. I’m sure others will fall into this trap.
I’m not going to address this email to Toshiba because their forum should be alerting them to their problems (link) instead, I’m addressing it to current and potential owners. The AC100 is still broken and I advise you to check your standby battery life and if you think I’m right, return the device. [If not, please let us know we’d love to strikethrough and update this article.] Potential owners should refrain from a purchase until there are clear confirmations that the problems have been fixed. Better still, pass the message on and highlight that the AC100 is not yet the device with the ‘ultimate battery life’.
For the last two nights I’ve been testing the ‘standby’ battery life on the Toshiba AC100. [Unboxing and overview video here] On the first test the battery was at about 30% capacity. I closed the lid and expected to have plenty of battery life left in the morning. When I woke up, the AC100 was dead. On the second test the battery was again at 30%. This time I turned the WiFi off before closing the lid. In that scenario I’d expect next to no drain at all. Again, when I woke up 7 hours later, the device was dead. Something’s wrong.
Looking at the battery information I’m seeing something strange.
Can you spot the issue on my WiFi-only AC100?
Yup, somehow the 3G subsystem is draining power which is really quite strange considering I don’t have 3G on this device. Have they left the 3G radio on the device and just removed the SIM slot? Have they forgotten to turn the 3G off in the firmware? Does ‘cell standby’ actually mean something else? I can’t imagine another subsystem in the AC100 that would take more power than the screen and Wifi. On my Android phone here, cell standby is taking only 9% of the power. When the firmware contains strings like ‘eng/test-keys’, commonly found on test builds, you’ve got to wonder what’s going on.
I’ll have to raise a support issue on this with Toshiba Europe.
Note: 12mins later, the graph was still the same. Cell Standby is taking 77% of the battery drain. Going to ‘airplane mode’ doesn’t appear to help.
Note: 30 mins later and ‘cell standby’ is up to 81%.
Anyone else experiencing the same on their AC100 (Is there anyone else out there with an AC100?)
Update: Just to be clear – active battery life is around the 6hrs mark (50% screen, wifi on) so there’s no problem with that. I’ve also found a lot of threads on forums that question the ‘cell standby’ measurement. One response says it’s a known issue in Android 2.1. Currently manually measuring screen-off drain.
In a third test last night I went to bed with about 60% drain. I woke up with 20% left – and the screen on. Something is turning the screen on and causing the drain. Have now done a factory reset to remove any of my sideloaded apps that may be turning the screen on. I’ll do another overnight test tonight.
Update: 1535 – 31 August.
With a fresh factory reset I’ve been testing the battery life over the last few hours.
With screen off, wifi on, idle, no usb subsystem, no sdcard i’m seeing 6 mins per 1% battery drain. That’s really not that good. 2.4W average drain. I’m expecting more like 1W.
With screen off, AIRPLANE MODE, no USB subsystem, no sdcard, idle, I’m seeing 13 mins per 1% battery drain. That’s 1.14W drain which is terrible for an ARM system. A smartphone with screen off and airplane mode would take about 20-50mw. Remember, the AC100 is effectively has smartphone internals so when you turn the screen off, there should be no difference (i’ve turned the USB host subsystem off and removed the SDcard to remove that from the equation.) Something is sapping over 90% of the battery which brings us back to the cell subsystem which, after these tests, was taking 84% of the power according to ‘battery status’ under Android. At this stage, i’m tempted to pull it apart. Will I find a surprise 3G module inside?
Update2 – 31st August.
I won’t be doing any more review work on the AC100 until I get to the bottom of this power issue because it’s a huge problem that takes away the main reason to have it in the first place. ARM-based devices do a good job at ‘always on’. Take the Archos 5 for example. It’s a Cortex-based Android device and just 30 minutes ago I checked some stats on it. It’s been sitting on my desk in a screen-off, wifi-off state for 4 days and 8 hours and get this, it has a battery that’s less than half the size of the battery in the AC100. Not only that, there’s 45% of the battery left. That’s under 50mw of drain. 20x less than the AC100. There’s the problem with the AC100!
Update 3: 5th Sept.
Toshiba Germany tell us that Froyo will be delivered in 6 weeks (Mid October) for the AC100. We have also reported the details of the above issue directly to the German product manager.
On the day that I stepped outside with my netbook to connect a solar panel and thought ‘hmm, a PixelQi screen would be nice,’ along comes a DIY article and test from Engadget on how to fit a PixelQi screen. Joanna Stern also gives some thoughts about usability and runs some tests to see just how much battery life the new screen would save over the old. It matches what we expected.
Installation on a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 seems very straight-forward and the results in the outdoor scenario are fantastic. Viewing angles are as tight as I experienced them at CES earlier this year though so you’ll have to be using this at the correct angle to get the best out of it. Indoors, the screen performs much like any other LCD, LED-backlit screen.
The interesting thing about Engadget’s report is the battery life testing. A lot of people have been raving about saving huge amounts of power by turning the backlight off and yes, expect 1-2 watts power saving in this test but it’s not a real-world scenario. In a normal office scenario with reasonable lighting, you’ll still need the backlight on to view the color. Given that the screen only accounts for 20-30% of battery drain, the maximum that can be saved is 30% but in indoor use, with a 30% backlight setting, you may only save 0.5-1W. On a modern netbook that’s about 10-15%. Engadget’s test shows a 25% difference in battery drain with backlight on (70%) and off. That’s in-line with what we predicted.
Based on battery life alone, it’s not worth the money but how much is it worth to be able to finally use the device outdoors? For mobile computing or even train usage, we think it’s worth it. Interestingly, on a ‘smart’ device like the Airlife 100, the battery life savings would be more significant. You could expect usage to rise from 10hrs to 15 or more as the screen backlight forms a larger part of the power envelope.
If you’ve got a Novatel Mifi 2372 (Canada) or 2352 (Europe) model, you might want to read this.
Update: Readers have confirmed that the 2352 is affected. See comments below and check back here for feedback from Novatel. I am in direct contact.
Apparently there have been some battery swelling issues reported on the 2372 related to Bell which have caused the battery door to become jammed. In two cases, it appears that customers have punctured their batteries by using sharp objects to remove the cover.
Engadget have reported the story (in a rather sensationalist fashion considering that this is a safety issue) and we’ve had a call from Novatel themselves who took the time to detail the issue.
Two carriers in Canada have reported the issue and Bell have made the decision to disable their MiFi’s remotely. (There’s a remote-kill feature?) Novatel have kicked off a program of battery and battery door replacements through the two carriers and issued a product advisory.
Note that there is no product recall taking place.
What they fail to address is the 2352 which is the same device with European HSPA bands. Novatel confirmed to us that the 2352 is the same design so one assumes that the same battery supplier is used and that the same problem can occur. 2352 owners out there, please be careful. Don’t use sharp objects to open the battery cover and if you experience a swollen battery, please let Novatel know (and drop a comment here so that we can pass it on too.)
I’d love to get out an do another Solar Computing Tour in 2010 but I’ll have to plan it carefully. Our new baby is due in March so maybe I can pull a long weekend together in late August but we’ll have to see how things go.
It doesn’t stop me thinking about solar computing though and in this post I’m going to compare a set of devices and some technologies that will be important for the job of Solar PC 2010.
Before I do that I want to highlight a few things that really haven’t changed much in the last 3 years. It’s a sad story of minimal progress.
Solar panels – NOTHING has changed. They’re still expensive and inefficient.
Battery Tech – NOTHING has change. They are still expensive and use the same technology as before.
Operating system choice – Nothing has really changed. If you want to work efficiently you need to choose the same OS as you use on the desktop. Mobile operating systems have come a long way but there are still too many potential roadblocks for the average productivity user. Windows 7 is nice but compared to XP it’s less efficient which in my book, makes it the best choice for efficient and productive mobile computing.
Screen technology. Outdoor users are still fighting the sun with LED backlights although this is a great step forward from the CCFL backlighting I used in 2007. Transflective screens are coming in 2010 though. See below.
Weather – Ah, there’s something that hasn’t changed much either! Still, constant chaos. (Thank goodness!)
Over the last 3+ years I’ve spent a rather embarrassing amount of time analysing battery drain on mobile computing devices. It’s become a specialty of mine to look at a device, look at the battery size and then estimate real-world battery life figures for certain usage scenarios although in the netbook world it really boils down to a simple equation take 30% off what you see on the specifications.
In the world of smart devices (computing and communication devices based around the ARM architecture) the equation is slightly different and as we move to ARM based tablets, pads and MIDs the equation gets even more wobbly because these devices can idle down to near-zero drain rates. Take the 300+hrs standby figures you see on some phones for example. With a 5W battery, that’s a drain of about 16mw, which is 100x less power than even the most efficient of PC-based mobile devices in idle mode. The problem is, however…
There’s no such thing as idle.
The days of ‘standby’ are long gone as even the most basic of phones are able to play music, access 3G networks, present information on backlit colour screens and run simple background tasks like alarm and event monitoring, location services, email polling and more. Move to a smartphone scenario and that 16mw idle figure is irrelevant. When I tested my N82 a few years ago I was shocked to find out that it could suck 9 batteries dry in a long day of heavy use.
I re-charged the device fully and did a static test using the same apps. Music playing, live GPS tracking (I use Nokia Sports Tracker) and IM via Gizmo. I left the device alone and didn’t use it. After 110 minutes it switched off indicating a 2.1W average drain from the 3.7wh battery. [Source]
Today I installed an interesting app on my N82 and confirmed those findings of nearly two years ago. Using the awesome (for geeks like me) ‘Energy Profiler’ for Symbian Series 60 I lay in bed for about an hour testing out various scenarios. Sure enough, the phone idled down to about 200mw and by simply streaming some music over 3G the figure shot up to 1W. Turn on GPS via the map application and crank up the volume and the device was using over 1.5W. Just cranking up the audio volume added 20-30% power load on the device!
The CPU is out of the equation
Last week at CES Nvidia announced Tegra 2. It’s one of the most powerful ARM-based processing platforms on the planet. Think 2-4 times more CPU processing power than even the fastest smartphone out there right now. It’s amazing and exciting, especially when you known that the CPU cores only take around 400-600mw under full load. Once again, this platform can idle down to an almost frozen state. The platform is slightly too big and power-hungry for small smartphones at the moment but expect to see this in high-end media and internet phones and upcoming tablets and MIDs. The 4-10 inch screen range.
When you get to screen sizes of 4 inch and above, something happens that levels the playing field for Intel somewhat. Their CPU platforms (*1) don’t idle down very well but in a typical ‘internet-connected’ scenario on one of these ‘smart’ devices, that becomes almost insignificant as the screen backlight adds such a huge load to the platform that when combined with Wifi, 3G, BT, GPS and audio, the CPU is just 10% of the total load. Swapping Intel out for ARM would save you just 5-10% battery life in an ‘active’ scenario.
Active standby
I’m a big fan of low-power computing and I understand that that most people won’t be using a device all the time so there’s a distinct advantage to use and ARM platform over a current Intel platform (*1) but usage models are changing and it’s now common to find people picking up a phone to use it once every few minutes and when they’re not using it, the GPS, Wifi, 3G and audio is still running. Simply being ‘connected’, polling the internet is going to mean that your device is going to be using 500mw of power on average. Standby is now an ‘active’ or ‘on-net’ experience.
Extreme Battery life marketing
All this confusion and range of figures is great for marketing teams. The ‘all-day’ connected’ expression will be used a lot along with a lot of talk about standby battery life of ‘days.’ Forget it! The average 4-10 inch tablet device will be using an average 1W to 2W per hour. Leave the screen backlight on along with a few flash and ajax-filled browser tabs running with a 10 inch slate and you’re in the 4W range. The 10W battery that would fit comfortably in such a device suddenly becomes a 2.5hr battery in that scenario.
Warning
You will hear a lot of battery life BS over the next year. Silicon manufacturers are in a truly critical fight to win in the new ‘smart’ devices market and as a result, they will use every weapon. BE AWARE that as devices get more fun, connected and dynamic, you will use them more and battery life will drop like a fly. IGNORE manufacturers battery life claims and wait for independent reviews. That’s what we’re here for!
I’m reporting from the IDF09 battery technology session.
Here’s what’s been happening in Li-Ion tech.
“3% per year improvements in capacity (watt-hours) inch If you ask me, that’s peanuts. Chemistry research not keeping up with Moore’s Law ;-)
Battery packs aren’t just cells…
11:27 am.
Trends Thin and light systems and their effect on battery packs. Here;s a nice diagram that explains how cell types affect design.
Prismatic cells 40% more expensive for same capacity.
Clearly cylindrical cells are more common.
Next few years:
More than 2600mah in a standard cell. (the ‘18650’ cell)
11:30 Sasmung now talking.
Samsung say 33% of customers willing to pay $45 for an extra hour
Inside a Samsung Cell.
Getting technical now…. Samsungs secret sauce for 3.0A
New technologys…. Silicon based anode. Getting too technical for me here!!!!
Bottom line: 30% improvement in Q3 2010. Sounds too good to be true. I’ve heard these sort of promises before!
11:42 Panasonic presenting…
Strategy slide:
NNP Nickel-based New Platform announced.
Generations of Li-Ion Li-Ion cells. 2nd generation is the currently available technology.
Reducing pack size to save money with higher-capacity cells.
11:55 Intel summary slide.
That’s all from the battery technology session at IDF09. I’ll continue to report on mobility topics at MeetMobility so check back regularly for updates.
