Battery Life, I'm impressed Options

[nyar]

Howdy,

Did a little experiment recently, wanted to see how long my SL-C860 would last when used as purely a portable 'wireless' media player (i.e. streaming audio from a shoutcast station). I found a hack on these boards to stop suspend, threw my wireless card in (Netgear), tuned into cliqhop, put the volume 75% up, turned off the screen, and let it run.

I let it run for about 12 hours, and it said it still had 90% battery left - wow. Would have left it for longer but I use my Z daily :-)

Anybody else care to share what kind of battery life they get out of their Z with various usage? My Z has the best battery life of any PDA I've seen, hands down.

[nyar]

Hmm, just tried this again and the battery's going down quicker this time; maybe the battery applet was just lying to me (what do others here get if they do simular things?). Still, I'm happy with the battery life, even when using the Z normally.

[ocman]

Hmm, just tried this again and the battery's going down quicker this time; maybe the battery applet was just lying to me (what do others here get if they do simular things?). Still, I'm happy with the battery life, even when using the Z normally.

common, you need to just let it run totally out, from full capacity to completely dead. only way to really test it for sure. it's only for one day right? =)

[nyar]

Heh, I figured somebody else here would have already done this and could report on results. Or are you interested if I tried it?

(More than a day, I hope... :-)

[omega]

I was sure it would be much (much!) less than this with the wireless card? Sounds very good.... suspicious...

[tumnus]

It just goes to show that even though WiFi is a power drain, the biggest drain by far is still the screen and in particular the light. Notice the screen was turned off for the test. When you are surfing the web over WiFi you are keeping the screen on constantly.

If someone could come up with a really low power light that was still as small, bright and pure as those used in current PDAs, they'd be laughing all the way to the bank.

[obscurite]

Wifi (Linksys WCF-11) drains as much or more battery (C860 1600mah) as the backlight does. With low-medium backlight settings, I can get probably 8 continuous hours, i'm guessing, based on my use for the last month. With wifi, that goes down to 2-3 hours. Seems like the wifi card is drawing slightly more juice than the screen is.

Now, instead of wifi I pretty much only use bluetooth (socket rev g). Bluetooth does not have a noticeable effect on battery life, whereas I notice the battery dropping rapidly when using wifi.

Perhaps there are more effecient wifi cards, than the WCF-11 which was one of the first CF cards around, I think.

-Daniel