Quote:
Originally Posted by knc1
Since the movement that prevents the non-metastable device from producing a latent (burned in) image is computed - -
You have just tossed away the battery run time of the Kindle, since to support the movement, the cpu (and other hardware) has to run.
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Yabbut not quite. The major power drain in this case won't be the CPU -- it'll be the e-ink screen update. The e-ink update is by far the most power-hungry thing the Kindle ever has to do: it even exceeds the power requirements of flash writes and full-speed CPU usage. We're not talking a few transistors flipping here: we're talking electric fields powerful enough to drag things around that are big enough to see!
You can actually detect this in a quiet enough room on some devices (it's louder on ones with less battery in the way of, uh, whatever is causing the noise, probably something vibrating under the field variation as the current level changes, so it's probably easiest to discern on an Oasis, though I did this on my PW1 to avoid jailbreaking my Oasis): hack up something to flip the screen just from black to white, with almost no CPU activity needed, and it'll make a quite discernible noise while that's going on. (It makes the noise when you flip pages normally, too, but that does involve noticeable CPU usage, so you can't rule either possibility out with an unhacked Kindle.)
I am not geekmaster so I cannot tell what the actual current draws are when this is going on, but the datasheets are fairly clear. e-ink displays are power-hungry beasts when they change state.