Quote:
Originally Posted by SaraD
Yes, but what kind of battery life do you get? None of my gadget toys with LCD screens get a really good battery life. Maybe a day or maybe 3 of heavy use at best and that is for basic mp3 players. However, that may have changed since I last made any major purchases of rechargable electronics. I am really hoping that the e-ink screens perform close to the advertised battery life. The only netbook numbers I've seen for battery life were pretty poor. Why would I want to have to recharge so often just to read?
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Good comment about battery life. As I mentioned in another post to Robert, my comments about price were as a comparison. As long as I'm buying a compromise device I expect prices similar to other portable electronics. If it is a superior device for ebook reading I don't mind paying extra for the features. Unfortunately, the devices available TODAY have too many compromises. I'm not ready to pay a premium (again) for a product with clear shortcomings (fragile, slow, poor button layout).
Specifically in regard to the battery life, I don't think you will find eink (today) anywhere close to the advertised battery life. Nobody will say for sure, but I think you have two problems:
1) Each e-ink page turn is actually 2 page refreshes. First it flashes the screen to clear off all of the previous content. Then it writes the new screen. If your device is rated at 8,000 page turns, turning the page 4,000 times with two refreshes each would run out your battery.
2) The battery life is not really only dependent on page turns. The processor also burns up juice. I suspect that the 8,000 is an ideal figure that assumes the processor is only running to turn pages (continuous page turns). In real life, there is probably some idle time with the processor running between page turns, and definitely processor use every time you start up and shut down the life. This also reduces battery life.
The bottom line is that I've never had problems finishing an entire book with my e-ink (reading books with up to 150,000 or so words), but I wouldn't count on finishing a second book without a recharge. This is a real improvement over laptops and pda's but its not a device that can run a week at the rate I read books -grin.
Michael