Pandora 2: Battery

How long should the battery last?


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    67

Askarus

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The perf/W of the SoC will probably be better than Pandora's, so I guess it probably depends on how much people need to stress it, and if they're comfortable with any reduction in battery life. I personally don't feel like I need anything like 10 hours of full load, but that's just me and I know a lot of people feel otherwise.


Of course that's also assuming that the battery dimensions won't change in some other way to compensate.. that while being thinner it isn't always higher in surface area (due to either extending out to cover more of the unit's base or the base simply being bigger in either dimension)

I'm worried not to get 10 hours of battery lifetime anymore.


This is one verry imoprtant feature for me because I don't want to charge my Pandora during the day.


What about you: Do you also think 10 hours are nececarry or would you be satisfied with less?


Do you know if there's already some progress with batteries? Will batteries which have the performance of Pandora's battery be smaler in 2013?


Craig, do you know anything battery related?
 
No reduction in battery life!


If I had the option to go for more than 10 hours, I would.


I would rather the P2 be bigger than the P1 in order to maintain our battery life.


I suppose I could live with an 8 hour battery life, but no less please!


Battery life should really be one of the biggest conciderations in the design of the P2. I would go so far as to say a good battery life is far more important than *any* other feature...


Give me a weaker soc, a smaller screen, a bulkier design, before you take away my battery life! :(


Am I in the minority here?


Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk 2
 
Glad to see nobody prefers thickness to battery life :) Yet...
 
I suppose I could live with an 8 hour battery life, but no less please!


Battery life should really be one of the biggest conciderations in the design of the P2. I would go so far as to say a good battery life is far more important than *any* other feature...


Give me a weaker soc, a smaller screen, a bulkier design, before you take away my battery life! :(


Am I in the minority here?
Nope


Edit: I mean minority wise
 
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The Battery life is clearly a big differentiator for me, too. I need to charge my Android phone everyday and I can simply not count on it at all. I always need to be careful about not using it too much for it to last a whole day. It's a pain in the...


With the Pandora, I never face such a problem. I just love this aspect of not having to worry constantly about the battery. The P2 should keep this as a big edge on all other systems.
 
Remember that the P1 has something more like a 15h battery life when not running flat out.


I'd be for a 10h (moderate load) battery, with a clip on battery compartment to take it up to 15h heavy/full load 20h moderate load, 30h light load
 
I also wouldn't mind a clip on attachment to extend the battery... If they insist on cutting the battery life to make it thinner - please give us this option!


I would be buying spare batteries anyway, so I hope the P2 allows for easy swapping of batteries.


Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk 2
 
the battery wont be removable so we dont go through the whole pandora battery thing again and lose all the money to piracy
 
If we can't swap out the batteries, then I *insist* on no less battery life we have now AND the ability to clip in an extender.


The battery life of the P1 isn't enough for me and that's why I have two batteries.


I would be hugely dissapointed to have a locked down battery life in the P2. :(


Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk 2
 
Battery won't be removable? Then 10-15 hours, no less.
 
the battery wont be removable so we dont go through the whole pandora battery thing again and lose all the money to piracy
was that a joke?

I assume that was an attempted joke.


Battery life is really a very nice property of the current Pandora, if the P2 will have less battery life than the P1, I'll consider it a downgrade. Batteries should be a bit more efficient now; the cpu etc. will probably also be more efficient in terms of Watt per operation but since it will be more powerful, it will probably still eat a bit more power (at full use anyway). So I hope those two compensate, so under full use, battery life remains the same. Under small load, I hope the battery life will actually be even better than it is now - since the battery should carry more mWh per cc, and I assume an idle cpu / low brightness screen will consume the same or less than on the P1.
 
I think a good target would be to give the user no reason to prefer a P1 over a P2 other than cost.


That means anything that changes must be replaced by something better or equivalent.


Hopefully this is what Craig means by best handheld ever.
 
10 hours is a must in my opinion. More is better, but 10 hours gets you through the day.
 
Only thing to improve could be the contact method to the Pandora. P1 Battery layed pretty loose in the case and only was held in place by the backcover and only in the "pressure direction" of the backcover, not very save imho.


P2 Battery part could have it's own plastic casing and part of the backside itself, like many Nokia mobile phones had/have, very stable construction. :)


OR just make the contacts sideways so the push of the backcover is not needed to keep the Battery in contact. ^^


Besides that, P1 Batttery concept is just fine and should be kept.
 
Longest possible battery life.. okay but under what conditions and under what expensive?


It's a given that the top of the line SoC in 2013 will use more power under high load than Pandora's (including the 1GHz version). Clock for clock Cortex-A15 will probably use more power than Cortex-A8 even on 28nm, it does far more work and it isn't magic. And it'll probably clock substantially higher. And there'll be two or four of them. And the GPU is going to be tens of times stronger, the power budget for those has definitely increased a lot as well.


And if you're running Android there'll probably be more overhead on the CPU time. Even for things like emulators, even when they're using the same core code they were on Pandora.


So these battery life questions are pretty difficult, since it'll probably vary a lot more wildly based on what you're doing than it does with the current Pandora. When you ask battery life are you talking web browsing? Simple games? Emulating NES? Emulating N64? Emulating Dreamcast? An average of those probably won't be very helpful.


But the biggest thing I'd be concerned about is a 1080p screen. Look at how much bigger iPad 3's battery has to be to offer the same battery life as iPad 2, and seeing as how that's not counting gaming that difference can be attributed almost entirely to the display. Power consumption on displays doesn't go down like it does for ICs, especially within the same general type of technology, and Pandora's display is very power efficient.


It'd be great if they have a design that gets more battery capacity out of a similar form factor. Like a laptop style battery that slides into the back and includes part of the back cover as part of its enclosure. Could get way more battery volume out of that, although you pay for it in added weight.
 
I'm mostly concerned about the screen - the CPU(s)/GPU drawing more power when heavily used is not a huge problem as long as its power use goes down when it is less used; for many use cases we won't need full CPU power (e.g. anything that runs on the current Pandora should only use a fragment of the power of the P2). The biggest power consumer is the screen and backlight anyway, and if it's going to be both bigger (5"?) and denser (720p or even 1080p?), it might eat a lot of power. Not to mention the extra CPU and GPU power needed to render the extra pixels.


A bigger screen area is nice, more pixels is ok (but please don't overdo it! Especially for retro gaming the extra pixels are just not needed!), but the most important thing to me is to improve the visibility in daylight situations. Even with the backlight at maximum it is almost impossible to use the current Pandora outdoors on a sunny day.
 
How many devices DO have good screen visibility in sunlight? There's Pixel Qi but I've heard other bad things about it..
 
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