[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!

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...

My questions to you are:
- What Pocket PC do you have and how many hours can you go?
- Which is the best Pocket PC 2002 device regarding battery life?
- Are there any tests published on the Internet that compare the battery life of the major Pocket PC 2002s?

[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!

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...

My questions to you are:
- What Pocket PC do you have and how many hours can you go?
- Which is the best Pocket PC 2002 device regarding battery life?
- 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