Boot Time

[Gaeryc]

booting on the pandora should be a lot faster than booting a PC at least if configured properly.

The point I was trying to make is that whether it takes 3 sec. or 3 min. to boot is completely irrelevant from a daily usage perspective. Maybe it will be faster than the GP2X, maybe it will be much slower. Either way it won't affect your ability to use the device on the go. You won't actually be booting up every time you whip out your Pandora to play a quick game.

I think that atleast everyone who has own a psp should understand that. Why in the hell would you want to boot the device, start the aplication and load data? If you suspend to ram or put it into power saving mode the battery is not going to take noticeable hit and you can start playing/surfing/reading etc. as soon as you open the lid. (maybe you need to push button or the power switch, but that depends on you)

 

[Ryzure]

QUOTE
I think that atleast everyone who has own a psp should understand that. Why in the hell would you want to boot the device, start the aplication and load data? If you suspend to ram or put it into power saving mode the battery is not going to take noticeable hit and you can start playing/surfing/reading etc. as soon as you open the lid. (maybe you need to push button or the power switch, but that depends on you)


The more complex the device, the larger the hit will be on battery life. I don't think we can know for sure that the battery won't take a noticeable hit in sleep mode until this puppy "hits the store shelves"

There's no need for the POST to last longer than .5 seconds, no need to see GRUB or LILO, and Linux should load from firmware pretty effing quickly. I reckon it'd take less than 5 seconds to get to the standard desktop. (When we start installing custom drivers, and display themes THEN it might take a while )

 

[Fishbong]

This discussion is stupid.
How often will you be booting up your Pandora anyway? Three times a month? Probably even less! So who cares if it takes one or two minutes...

 

[Kyo]

I, for one, will probably be booting it on a daily basis

 

[chad78]

I, for one, will probably be booting it on a daily basis
Booting ≠ turning it on. You should be using "suspend mode" or whatever it's called to save battery life. My PSP never reboots. I would have to take out the battery or press a special button combo on start up to get it to reboot. When you turn it off, it goes into suspend mode. The Pandora will (likely/hopefully?) be the same way.

Rebooting isn't something that you need to do much anymore, even on computers or UMPCs. My MacBook stays on 24/7 - only rebooting if there is a software update that requires it - or if I have screwed up my flaky browser in a way that I can't fix otherwise. (With Flock, it happens every other week or so.) And then, I usually just log out and log back in - so that's not a real reboot either.

I read that for my N800, at least, it was *better* for the battery to leave it on all the time - just put it in sleep mode when not in use - than to turn it all the way off and all the way on.

That's especially true if you are going to use it everyday. Just leave it on. Close the lid when you aren't using it and open it when you want it next.

 

[Kyo]

I want my machine to be off when I turn it off. And I don't wanna sacrifice 120MB of my precious SD space, so I will be booting it quite often. (Unless the waiting time is unbearable)

 

[Fishbong]

No, no, no. You are getting it all wrong. Obviously you never used a Palm or PSP.
So let me explain: When you turn the device off, it will just power down everything but the RAM, the power needed to keep the content of the RAM is minimal, it won´t need space on the SD to save anything. you can keep the device in suspension for more than a week without recharging. This way you can turn it back on and it´ll be ready in less than a second, you can turn it off anytime and not lose anything, your game, your movie, your application will be in exactly the same place it was when when you turned the device off.

This is the future anyway, Samsung is now developing a kind of RAM that will keep its contents ebven when unpowered. In about ten years, booting will be something you do very seldomly.

 

[Kyo]

Yeah, I know about that. but as how I said, when my device is off, i want it to be off.
I might change my opinion once I get the pandora, though.

 

[cb88]

yeah i can see what your saying there chip... but i don't partucularly like the idea of the boot ever taking more than a minute or even 30 seconds and i guess most people will just suspend to ram.... and that should come on almost instantly assuming that suspend to ram is working for instance it has never worked on my desktop... or any linux desktop that i have used but i guess that is bacause they are all a couple years old

@fishbong iirc some of the PDAs already have nram that is non volitile....

 

[rumsey]

No, no, no. You are getting it all wrong. Obviously you never used a Palm or PSP.
So let me explain: When you turn the device off, it will just power down everything but the RAM, the power needed to keep the content of the RAM is minimal, it won´t need space on the SD to save anything. you can keep the device in suspension for more than a week without recharging. This way you can turn it back on and it´ll be ready in less than a second, you can turn it off anytime and not lose anything, your game, your movie, your application will be in exactly the same place it was when when you turned the device off.

This is the future anyway, Samsung is now developing a kind of RAM that will keep its contents ebven when unpowered. In about ten years, booting will be something you do very seldomly.

I have both a Palm and a PSP, and I completely understand where Kyosys is coming from. I don't ever usually put my PSP in suspend mode. Why? Well cause I have a DS and I know I won't be coming back to the PSP for several days

If I fully charge the PSP and then put it to sleep it will be dead on the 3rd day if I go to play a game. The Palm is another story, it can probably last a week or maybe even longer... but the Palm uses MUCH less power and maybe not even a single program I'd call processor intensive.

So given what I know about the PSP and Palm, and dozens of other pdas/umpcs/consoles I don't think there's any reason to go around saying "YOU'RE NEVER GONNA REBOOT IT!", right now anyways. After all, to me, the Pandora has a lot more in common with a PSP than a Palm, both on the hardware and software side (3d apps, hardware acceleration) and with processor usage. So while I don't have any sort of good idea at all how long the Pandora will last in sleep, all preliminary information leads me to believe it will be on par with the PSP... and in that case, I WILL want to turn the damn thing off pretty often.

I don't think this will be an issue, they should be able to get a cold boot under a minute which is fine for me.

 

[Chip]

So while I don't have any sort of good idea at all how long the Pandora will last in sleep, all preliminary information leads me to believe it will be on par with the PSP

Assuming the firmware handles sleep mode properly, it will be much better than the PSP. The OMAP3530 uses LPDDR memory, which is extremely power efficient. I can't find any actual numbers for the 3530's power use while asleep (probably because the thing isn't officially available yet) but considering the large size of the Pandora's battery and all the power saving tricks built into LPDDR memory, I'd be very surprised if the system ate more than 5% of the battery life per day in sleep mode.

Like I said, it's a complete non-issue unless you're going to be away from power for a week or two.

 

[rumsey]

So while I don't have any sort of good idea at all how long the Pandora will last in sleep, all preliminary information leads me to believe it will be on par with the PSP

Assuming the firmware handles sleep mode properly, it will be much better than the PSP. The OMAP3530 uses LPDDR memory, which is extremely power efficient. I can't find any actual numbers for the 3530's power use while asleep (probably because the thing isn't officially available yet) but considering the large size of the Pandora's battery and all the power saving tricks built into LPDDR memory, I'd be very surprised if the system ate more than 5% of the battery life per day in sleep mode.

Like I said, it's a complete non-issue unless you're going to be away from power for a week or two.


This still sounds a little presumptuous considering you don't have the numbers for the 3530, and the random 5% guess... but it sounds like you have a little better idea behind the power distribution in the hardware during sleep mode, so could you explain why the PSP eats so much battery in sleep mode? Surely its not using some ancient nasty kind of ram that sucks down gobs of power just to keep the contents from going volatile?

 

[Javacat]

So this thread has got me thinking.. Is the power switch on the Pandora a hardwired power switch that is going to instantly turn the power off, with the switch locked in the off position or is it going to be spring loaded and controlled through the software, where you slide it and it initiates some sort of standby mode/initiates shuts down (depending on what the user has set it to do), with you holding it to force the device to power off?

 

[jmetal88]

I'm actually hoping that it's a physical off switch and not a soft off switch.

 

[Kyo]

I second that

 

[chad78]

I don't want a totally off switch. That's pointless. Most laptops don't even have an "instant completely-off" switch, and battery life is much more of a concern on them.

It should be a power button. you press it, and the options come up - sleep, lock, or off. (or whatever the options are). And you decide. It should be user choice - not just instant off.

Personally, I hope it just suspends on close if I haven't set it to docked mode. (Docked mode would be using an external monitor and controls - mouse, keyboard, game pad, whatever.)

 

[jmetal88]

Most laptops don't even have an "instant completely-off" switch

And that really annoys me, especially when Windows is crashing. When I want to shut down while Windows is not crashing, I go through the start menu rather than push the button.

 

[Gaeryc]

So this thread has got me thinking.. Is the power switch on the Pandora a hardwired power switch that is going to instantly turn the power off, with the switch locked in the off position or is it going to be spring loaded and controlled through the software, where you slide it and it initiates some sort of standby mode/initiates shuts down (depending on what the user has set it to do), with you holding it to force the device to power off?

If what I have read has been true, it will be spring type and programmable BUT if you press it for about 5 seconds it will do a hardcoded complete shutdown.

 

[Kyo]

I hate it when my device accidentaly stays on draining all the batteries, because the power button is not what it fucking should be

 

[rumsey]

I hate it when my device accidentaly stays on draining all the batteries, because the power button is not what it fucking should be

Ditto, I have this problem with so many of my portable devices...