battery life on ppc...

[strangetanks]

I recently switched from a tungsten t3 to an asus a730. I was pretty excited to switch but I'm really disapointed by the battery life. I can only get about 2 hours playing mp3's with the screen off before I get a battery warning. Is this a pretty typical battery life for one of these devices? My old tungsten could play for 14+ hours (I listen to a lot of books on mp3) then would recharge in 15 minutes. Even my old visor prism with a mp3 springboard could play for what seamed like forever. I was really looking forward to switching to ppc but so far am pretty underwhelmed.


Strange Tanks

[ADBrown]

The A730 has notoriously short battery life, among the shortest of any PocketPC. I'd advise you ditch it. If you want a VGA model, the best options are the Axim X50v, Loox 720, or iPaq 4700. The Axim has a great design and 3D accelerator/video decoder chip, but has a slightly short battery life (nowhere near as bad as the A730). The Loox has 128 MB of RAM and large standard battery, but is rather expensive. The iPaq has a 4" screen and a huge standard battery, but is rather large and has terrible buttons and controls.

[jimski]

With the iPAQ 4700's 1800mAh battery, I think you could come pretty close (if not better) than the 14+ hours from your TT playing MP3's with the screen dimmed. And the buttons/controls are just fine if you are not a gamer.

If your primary use is listening, not viewing, you would be wasting a lot of the 4700's best feature, it's 4" VGA screen. You might want to look at some other devices with QVGA screen (added benefit of consuming less energy) and a good size battery.

But what I really want to see is that battery charger that can charge a near dead PDA battery in 15 minutes. Now that would be something.

[surur]

As you can see by this graphic, two hours are not anywhere near acceptable for your device:
http://www.mobile-review.com/pda/review/image/vga-comparing/battery-s.png

We ran battery life tests in 3 working modes. The first mode is the maximum load (the highest backlight level, the highest clock rate, video playback from the storage card at the highest bitrate). The MP3 mode features the lowest clock rate, the playback from the storage card, the screen off, a comfortable sound volume. The reading mode - the lowest backlight level, the lowest clock rate, auto scrolling in Haali Reader, the storage card not involved. The standard battery provided the following results:
http://www.mobile-review.com/pda/review/vga-comparing-en.shtml

I suggest either there is something wrong with your device, or you are not using the power saving features properly.

Is your wifi and bluetooth off. Is your screen really off. Is your processor on automatic. If all these are true you either have a dud battery or some kind of abnormal power drain on your pocketpc.

These days there should be about power parity between pocketpc's and palm. Your current experience is not really typical. I suggest you make a support call and complain.

Surur

[Kowalski]

welcome the the windows mobile world strangetanks,
t3 is a very good device but i hope you will be familiar with windowsCE devices soon.
about battery life there are some tweaks that will increase your runtimes
to name afew did you disable beaming from connections?
are you running on full power mode or powersaving mode?
are you closing the programs or just minimising them?

[strangetanks]

thanks for the tips. I'll start playing around with the settings more to see if I can minimise the battery drain.

Someone mentioned closing any running apps. Is there some peice of software that can give me a taskbar similar to windows which would tell me whats minimised without having to go through the settings/memory/ect...?

Strange Tanks

[surur]

Pocketpc's work best with some essential 3rd party software.

You definitely need pocketplus (http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/products/pocketplus/?en). To further improve your experience I suggest netfront (http://nfppc.access.co.jp/english/)and pocketinformant (http://www.pocketinformant.com/p_pocketinformant.php)and pocketbreeze (http://www.sbsh.net/products/pocketbreeze/).

Dont forget to give betaplayer (http://betaplayer.corecodec.org/)a go too.

Also check out this website: http://www.pocketpcfreeware.com/en/index.php

btw, can I just re-emphasise that your 2 hour battery life is highly unusual (unless you are using wifi and watching a movie at the same time on maximum screen brightness), and that you should not have to close background apps in the normal course of events. I still suspect a dud battery.

Surur