Battery Life of Zaurus SL6000L

[naanu]

:?:
I would like to know what kind of battery life are you people getting from 6000L. I got my 6000L on Friday and charged it fully (six hours). When I started using it, I was surprised that the first 25% (approx.) of the battery power was spent in just 10 minutes. I called SHARP and found those guys to be extremely unfriendly, unhelpful, arrogant and ignorant. The service representative told me that he had absolutely no information regarding the battery life since it hasn\'t yet come from their product people. That bloke didn\'t know to properly answer even basic questions about the product. He asked me to charge the battery for full 24 hours, while the manual indicated time for full-charge as only 4 hours. Anyway... I charged the unit for a full 24 hours. These are the results of my study:

BACKLIGHT: Just a notch above total darkness (that is, 20% backlight).
APPLICATION: Opened up a HancomMobileSheet
WIFI: ON at all times, except on one occassion indicated by (*)
BATTERY CHARGE: FULL (charged for 24 hours)

TIME (minutes)       BATTERY LEVEL
16                 25% battery drained
10
10
30(*)       WiFi was kept \"OFF\" during this duration
44
35
39                 75% battery drained
25                 Battery was very low and the unit shut-off automatically

The unit shut-off automatically after a total of 209 minutes, roughly three and a half hours.

I thought that the battery should last longer than that! SL5600 seems to have a longer battery life although the manual says that the power consumption is 3.4 Watts, while 6000L is supposed to draw only 2.6 Watts. Agreed that SL5600 has a 1700mAh battery as against 6000L, which has only a 1500 mAh battery. But still......!!??

While on the subject, a 6000L review indicated that power users can have the option of using \"a supplemental battery equipped expansion jacket...\" Do you guys have any information about this and where it would be available?

Also, is there any external keyboard compatible with 6000L?

Thanks folks. I always enjoy the postings in this group.

Warm regards,
Naanu

[GoLinux]

New Li-Ion batteries has to be \"conditioned\" to get to their rated full capacity. It is usually recommended to completely charge and discharge a new battery 3 or 4 times to do that. Unless I\'m getting your posting wrong, it seems you have gone through a complete charge/discharge cycle only a couple of times.

Before getting worried I\'d would do that two more times and then check again.

It is usually difficult to test batteries capacity in real-world conditions, by the way. There are just too many variables. That\'s why reviewers do things like running a movie in a loop until the unit shuts down and stuff like that. It is useless data trying to figure out \"mileage\" in real use conditions, but it is good for comparison with other machines.

Good luck with your battery, hopefully you just have to break it in, so to speak....  

[Ethereal]

1.) The expansion sleeve is available at Amazon.com.

2.) WiFi, awesome as it is, is also a notorious battery killer.  Unless you are actively using it for network connectivity, I would advise turning it off under \"field\" conditions, and would consider turing it off whenever not needed a much more realistic model of battery drain.

[Codefire]

If I remember correctly didn\'t the pre-release docs say that with the WiFi on you would only get a bit more then 2 hours of use per charge? The time quoted doesn\'t seem that bad in that reference.