Post-Update, Battery Life Survey (real world usage)

Been lurking and am very tempted to pull the trigger on an Edge. However, I was hoping to get a feel for how many hours of battery life people were getting out of their Edge under different kinds of usage (primarily e-ink vs both screens with wifi, etc.).

If you guys could chime in, I would really appreciate it. Neither the Kindle DX, nor the iPad would really fit my needs, but at least before the update it seemed like they had a clear advantage in battery life, and I'm wondering how true that is now.

Thanks a bunch.

I would have expected a bigger difference between E-Ink only vs LCD. The Kindle DX battery is 1530mAh and they claim two weeks of usage with WiFi off (maybe that's exaggeration).

The EE battery is 3400 mAh. Shouldn't it be able to beat the pants off of the DX in terms of E-ink lifetime, its the same screen right? 10 hours seems pretty low in comparison.

Am I missing something?

Prior to yesterday's udpate, my battery usage had been running about the same as borisb's (5-7 hours with "everything" on--the lower end of that if downloading and watching videos--and roughly 12 hours with the LCD and WiFi off). And as borisb said, I haven't gotten a sense yet of battery usage since the udpate.

According to Wikipedia:

Kindle 2: Freescale 532 MHz, ARM-11
Kindle DX: Freescale 532 MHz i.MX31L, ARM-11

The Marvel is basically ARM, isn't it? So, in general terms they're comparable processors.

Well I think you would need double the power draw to get half the battery life, but that's not the point.

I guess I was working under the assumption that the CPU doesn't drain much power when there aren't any computations running . I don't see what it needs to be computing when the system is essentially be used as an e-reader (or at least it doesn't need to be thinking any more than the Kindle DX would with every page turn). Even with a faster processor, given that the EE has more than double the battery capacity, it seems like the device should have the potential to match or beat the DX in terms of battery life in e-reader mode (with snappier response times).

I fully appreciate your point that its a new device from a new company, and perhaps I shouldn't expect such a versatile device to beat more specialized devices. Nevertheless, part of the appeal of e-ink is that draws so little power that it enables weekly charging, so its a shame if the background OS with nothing running is draining the battery faster than the E-ink page turns.

I can not see an improvement in battery life after update, can you?

I've used the EE all day today leaving it on and only closing it (suspend mode) while not in use. After 10+ hours my battery status states 40%; that is a vast improvment from what I gott before the update. The same type of usage before the update would drain my battery to 0% in 6-7 hours.

Originally Posted by borisb

The neat thing about the suspend mode is that you pay in battery life only when you're actually using the eDGe. So if you use it for 5 minutes out of an hour (keeping it closed the rest of the hour), you only pay for 5 minutes of battery life. Can make a big difference over the course of a day.

Its not quite off when suspended though. You will slowly exhaust the battery. But for me, the change means I only need to charge it once a day.

Originally Posted by borisb

My empirical measurement indicates it would take 33 hours to exhaust the battery

You're good! One item to note about suspend mode that might stump some users: certain Android apps hold a "wake lock" that can prevent the eDGe from suspending. For instance, if a user is playing a playlist in the Music App, and closes the eDGe, the eDGe will continue to play (via speakers, bluetooth or headset jack) the remainder of the playlist before releasing the wake lock and allowing the eDGe to suspend. Any 3rd party app can hold a wake lock and prevent the eDGe from suspending.

Just something to be aware of.