Thread: Battery issue after upgrade
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Rocketman is offline Rocketman
2007-08-09 , 10:42
Posts: 550 | Thanked: 110 times | Joined on Aug 2006
#24
Originally Posted by Milhouse View Post
Oh man, the battery status indicator is truly hopeless... in the last few minutes I've been listening to FM radion on my 4.2007 device with 3 battery bars left. Via an ssh session (which I'd had open for about 3 hours over WiFi) I more'd the first ten lines of a text file and instantly the "Battery low" warning sounded and I'm now staring at 0 bars left and almost constant "Battery low" warnings (every minute or so).

I don't know if the ssh activity had anything to do with the sudden depletion of battery capacity but really, it can't get much worse than this. The accuracy of the remaining power is woeful and such a vital monitoring feature is in danger of becoming yet another gimmick on this platform.
Active use of wifi really eats power. When you turn yet another chip on in the device, the additional current draw is going to cause the battery voltage to sag and read as a low battery even when it still has some life left in it. Your typical battery meter is simply a digital multimeter sampling the voltage of the battery. Different battery types are going to have different use curves, but if you draw current from a battery at a high rate you are going to get many few amp-hours of capacity out of the battery than if you were drawing current at a low rate. Quite simply, turning a lot of dohickies on at the same time is going to result in very poor battery life. Try to keep the backlight low and turn off bluetooth and wifi when you are not using them and you will get MUCH better battery life.