How's your battery's life?

[Andy Sjostrom]

The new Pocket PC 2002 hardware represents improvements in many areas, battery life included. I went from an iPAQ Pocket PC 3630 to an HP Jornada 565 and get surprisingly more hours from one charge. I get about 2-4 days of real use with my HP Jornada 565 from one charge. That means I can actually forget the charger in my office on Friday afternoon, and still have batteries left on Monday morning! Could I have pulled that off with my old iPAQ Pocket PC 3630? No way!<br /><br />I never thought I would care so much about battery life, being an "Enterprise System Architect", and all. But hey, without batteries I wouldn't be able to implement those use cases and drive those business benefits...<br /><br />My questions to you are:<br />- What Pocket PC do you have and how many hours can you go?<br />- Which is the best Pocket PC 2002 device regarding battery life?<br />- Are there any tests published on the Internet that compare the battery life of the major Pocket PC 2002s?

[bblock]

c'mon, Andy - tell me how you do use case diagrams on your Pocket PC! Is it a 99% scaled down version of Rational Rose? Visio 2002 Pocket PC Edition? MSPaint?

[AKBishop]

I agree.. the batteries really took a step up. I use my iPAQ 3835 as an organizer during the week and don't have to charge it but once if that. On weekends I use it more heavily for notes/Bible at church and music. So it usually gets a Friday night charge to gear up for the weekend and a Sunday night charge to last all week.

Perhaps if I were a heavier user I might need to charge it more. But most of the computer stuff I do involves writing code and you just need a huge screen and real keyboard for that.

[innersky]

I don't know about others, but with my 1 year old iPaq, battery life isn't good anymore.
It used to last a lot longer a year ago then it does now. And I mean really a lot difference.

It's actually hard to understand that my cellphone, that's 3 years old and has a Li Ion battery still has the same battery life as 3 years ago...

[Claudia]

There is a comparison of the four Pocket PCs 2002 at pocket.at, including also batteries. It is in German, but maybe the graphs give you some hint.

http://www.pocket.at/forum/ppcvergleich.htm

[Andy Sjostrom]

"c'mon, Andy - tell me how you do use case diagrams on your Pocket PC! Is it a 99% scaled down version of Rational Rose? Visio 2002 Pocket PC Edition? MSPaint?"

Sorry. Misunderstanding! I don't do use case diagrams ON my Pocket PC! I use them on my dev PC to describe the use cases in which the Pocket PC is used... Then I develop the code that runs on my Pocket PC to implement the functionality needed to support the use case.

[Timothy Rapson]

I get about a couple of weeks on my Ipaq. I can listen to music for ohh....20 hours or so without recharging. Have never gotten a battery low message since I got my 3150 (oops this was for the PPC 2002 Color models... :lol: )....

One thing I don't miss about not having the latest and greatest.

[Sparky]

I recently did a test, mainly to see how CF cards impact battery life. I loaded up a 128MB card with music to see how long I could go on my HP 567.

Test parameters:
Screen on
Backlight off
Headphones in
Volume at 25%
Winodws Media Player going non-stop
Very occasional PIM program usage

I was able to go 7:35 straight before the first warning, which I think comes at about 25% power remaining. I've heard you can go quite a bit beyond this, but didn't want to risk battery damage. I'm planning on performing the same test without a CF card and with my new 512MB CF card.

[vetteguy]

If I'm using my Jornada at work then I have the Symbol wireless card in it 95% of the time. Before I was able to use the power saving modes battery life wasn't great, but now I seem to be able to get quite a bit of runtime out of it. I'm a pretty bad test case, however, as I tend to keep it cradled whenever I'm not using it. (Although once for a test I put the card in, initiated a wireless ActiveSync, and let it stay in sync for 8 hours, and the battery dropped about 50%)

[Ken Mattern]

Yesterday I attended a conference and demoed Pocket PC 2002 software that I am developing on my Jornada 568. I ran about 4 hours continiously with a D-Link 802.11b wireless card. Only at the end of the day did I get a battery message. The PPC was not fully charged when I started. All in all I have been very satisfied with the battery life on the 568.

Ken

[JohnnyFlash]

I always struggled with battery power on my PPC, particularly when I had a Microdrive which reduced running time to about 1.5hr.

However, something that could prove useful was mentioned on a BBC Radio4 'article' where someone had developed PPC software, an audio web browser. Rather than brows the web looking for pages and links, pages would be 'described' and contents read (it did a whole lot more as well).

I can imagine this being cumbersome, but with reliable speech based navigation and wot-not, not having to use the screen would save a lot of power (unless you're using your PPC to warm up your pocket - a microdrive - that is).

[entropy1980]

My 3835 I get decent battery life, better than my old Ipaq but still not great I can get through maybe 2-2.5 days on one charge, however most of the time I leave it on the charger when not in use. It does feak me out sometimes that it seems to drop sooooo fast when you add any kind of card or adjust the brightness up.....

[fireflyrsmr]

steady use during an 8 hour work day of writing and PIM stuff would drain the battery.

bought a pcmica sleve and never have trouble now getting through the day. i charge every night. the machine is about a year old. battery life is still great with the sleve in place.

[dma1965]

I still have my 3670 (Girlfriend got it) and a 3870, and the battery improvement in the 3870 is significant. I used to get paranoid about going out without backup battery power with my 3670, because any use at all would drain it soooo fast. My 3870 will easily last through a day of heavy use, dropping only 50% or so in that time. I am a network administrator, and use it to check connectivity over ethernet at our retail locations, as well as telneting to routers. When I used my 3670, one session would bring me down to 60%, and the next one would usually bring up a warning. My 3870 does not have this problem. My girlfriend uses the 3670 to play games, and read e-books, and sometimes we will both sit on the couch, in true geek fashion and she will be playing a game, and I will be changing TV channels, syncing wirelessly, reading email, and playing a game. After about 30-40 minutes, she gets the low battery warning, and I don't even go below 80% !!!

[griph]

I still have my 3670 (Girlfriend got it) and a 3870, and the battery improvement in the 3870 is significant. I used to get paranoid about going out without backup battery power with my 3670, because any use at all would drain it soooo fast. !!!


Is this because of PPC 2002 or just the fact that the iPaq 3850/70 has an upgraded battery?!

[kagayaki1]

I seem to get pretty good tests on my 3870. One of the more interesting tests is running the Bluetooth continuously to see how that would affect it. I noticed only an hours less battery time running the BT while I was doing various PIM stuff. All in all, very moderate drain for the BT radio.

Overall battery life is great! I also have a 3150, and I've of course noticed the 3870 battery life is relatively shorter to the 3150, but not short enough to be annoying. I also experience about 10 hours real time use (1/2 backlight) and find that to be more than enough.

[dma1965]

Both my 3670 and 3870 are running 2002, so I am certain it is a hardware (battery) issue.

[toml]

My battery life is much worse. I went from a Casio E125, which had wonderful battery life, to an E200, which is far worse. Average use in an 8-hour day leaves it at about half charge. Heavy use nearly drains it.

Dunno why Casio felt the need to go from a 1500MAh to a 950MAh battery?

I guess the upside is that I've got a removeable battery pack and can just carry a spare...

[jdhill]

My battery life is much worse. I went from a Casio E125, which had wonderful battery life, to an E200, which is far worse. Average use in an 8-hour day leaves it at about half charge. Heavy use nearly drains it.

Dunno why Casio felt the need to go from a 1500MAh to a 950MAh battery?

I guess the upside is that I've got a removeable battery pack and can just carry a spare...

Yup, Casio seems to have taken a step backwards in battery life. I went from a Casio E-115 to a Casio E-200. The E-200 appears to have about 1/2 the battery life that the E-115 did. I can go about 2 days of light use before I have to recharge the E-200 while the E-115 was good for about 4-5 days of light use.

[Take1]

My 3850 gets about 5 - 5.5 hours at 1/4 brightness reading eBooks. Better than my old 3750, but I'd really like to get a solid 8 hours @ 1/2 brightness. The new power coverpacks should make this happen (I hope).

[Jason L.]

The first warning appeared on my Jornada 568 after 1hr 50min reading at 3/4 backlight. Is it something wrong with my battery :?:

[edl]

Hello I have a Jornada 568 since 2 weeks, i've just made Five-Six charges, and i get 6h30 to 7h30 battery life, with 1/4 backlight (playing games, reading, writing etc...)

Nice battery life but two inconvenients (little) : the battery life fluctuate. sometimes 6h00, sometimes 7h00, once near 8h00 !
Secondly, the battery life visualisation is strange (i talk about the 100% -75%-50%-25%-0%)

usually :

100% to 75 % : 1h30
75% to 50% : 1h15
50% to 25% : 1h10
25% to 0% : 2h40
0% to countdown extinction : 1h

Very strange.

[tccox]

Using Uptime to track battery usage I get 4 - 4.5 hours of normal use on my 3835. That's backlight on and with 32 meg SD memory card and also some CF modem use. Just returned from 8 day trip out of country and was worried about loss of data because I'd forgotton to put IPAQ on charger before leaveing (did'nt take IPAQ with me) But all was well, was down to about 20% after setting unused and uncharged for 8 days. Not sure what charge was when I left.

[martin_beek]

Is this because of PPC 2002 or just the fact that the iPaq 3850/70 has an upgraded battery?!


I'm not sure if PPC has better management over power hungry components in the ipaq, but the 38xx series lasts longer because it does in fact have a new battery, which has been upgraded from 950ma to 1100ma i believe - :D