battery life with gps on?
 

I'm considering buying a n810 to go hicking and use it as a gps device (using maemo mapper)
I have a N800 and a bluetooth gps, in such use the battery life is about 8H (gps and n800 link on all time, just looking from time to time the n800 and tracking activated)
however I often loose link with the gps device and this unreliability is a real bother when safety is in concern...

I looked into garmin gps but the mapping facility of garmin is rather poor... you have to use a proprietary map format and the unit that can use jpeg scanned/downloaded maps are at high price... much more than the n810...

so my question is how much battery life might I expect from n810 with the gps in use?

the test conditions : gps on and track loging activated, device is woke up one or 2 times per hours with an average use of 1 to 2 minutes...

thanks and regards
JLM

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

Should be about 5 hours.

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

that seems like an awfully low figure for such low usage.
Without gps I can wake my device up as often as required all day long for a few minutes at a time and not notice the battery moving.

Does it really cost that much battery to listen to gps that I couldnt get through a workday?

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

why "should" ? I read on another thread that the gps unit use less power than the bluetooth link.... if true it should be more than 8h no?

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

There's a lot of speculation in a lot of threads...

I don't know, but I'd expect the GPS to use more power than talking to a BT GPS (which is mostly receiving). Could be wrong, of course; I haven't done any research, as I don't have an N810 and almost certainly would not use its GPS much if I had one. (I've got two BT GPSes already.)

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

well I noticed that the bluetooth link is awfully hungry.... I done several testing for comparing bluetooth@10mW versus Wifi@10mW and while I can keep a 54Mb/s link up 15m away between 2 walls with the wifi, I can't even keep the bluetooth link up 1m away... when I activate bluetooth the battery life consume really fast... leading to 8h of use on the n800...
for me the issue is the gps not the n800

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

can someone make a test? I just need to know if it can go higher than a whole hicking day (best case would be 16h up)
thanks
JLM

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

Using MaemoMapper and having GPS on and display on my battery lasts about 4 hours. Having display off most of the time should increase the time, that's why I said about 5 hours. The GPS chip when tracking continuously does use quite a bit of juice. Before when I had N800 and external Bluetooth GPS my usage time was longer.

Certainly you'll not get nowhere close to 8 hours... unless you buy that Mugen 3000mAh battery... :rolleyes:

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

Actually that battery's 3600mAh (I believe you're the first I've seen to get the capitalization right on mAH, BTW;)).

It really helps, but I'm still not sure it'd get you 16 hours with Maemo Mapper; I'd just get an auxiliary power pack to recharge it...

Re: battery life with gps on?
 

did someone tried without maemomapper but with the cgpxlogger from gpsd package?