spaetz,
I don’t think that we really
disagree; if the DR worked as I believe an owner could reasonably expect, I wouldn’t have given the matter of it not fully turning off a second thought. As it is,
by design (owing to the need to power the cap sense circuitry to turn the DR on), and
as originally shipped, the user had no way to prevent an enormous power loss while the DR was turned ‘off.’ To me, it matters little what the
cause was--iRex
knew that it was like that when they decided to put the DR on the market, and they shipped it
anyway. A simple power switch at the battery would have reduced power loss while ‘off’ to the battery’s own self-discharging level,
no matter what
caused the loss.
As for the cap sense switches
themselves (aside from the need for power while ‘off’), my objection--and it is
my primary objection--is to their quirky behavior; they have too often been distracting me from the work I was trying to do--which has, along with the battery issues, caused me to not use the DR at times when it could have been benificial, and those times were a big part of my decision to buy. BTW: I would bet that the cap sense circuitry includes its own micoprocesser; for example, Atmel’s
QTouch and Cyrex’s
CapSense lines are specialized for capacitive sensing (of all kinds, not just pushbuttons), and doing it with the DR’s processor would add an unbearable (I think, at least in terms of the user experience) load. If the circuitry were better tuned to handle environmental varibles, I’d be quite happy with the choice. With the circuitry as it is, I’d prefer standard switches, thanks.
Again, I don’t think it was engineering that made the,
shall we say, bad choices. I don’t believe the software guys pushed to have a ‘not ready’ version of Tabs included in 1.7;
more likely they begged to get it finished first. The same with hardware; these choices are usually made higher up, and commonly are driven by the need to meet deadlines set by people who
demand results, regardless of
anything. It might be bean-counters--investors maybe--but there’s no telling... The sad thing is that these kinds of choices have ruined many good companies and careers.
I really hope iRex gets it right on the DR800, or they’ll go down the tubes.
Shaggy,
Well over a year ago, I was looking for charger design info for non-lithium based batteries, and happened on an article or white paper that considered the pros and cons of poly vs. non-poly lithium ion batteries. That article stated that while the memory issue was not as significant as with non lithium rechargable types of batterys, the poly battery was superior. I made the note in my head and continued looking for what I wanted to know. Later, after I had bought my EZReader, I saw this in the Astek manual (page 6) (it is the same in the Hanlin version):
* The battery should be charged at least twelve hours when firstly use.
It's better to recharge it after its power completely exhausted. Please do the above-mentioned process in the first three times use. [Italics mine; the grammer is original,
not mine.]
I took this to refer to a memory issue with the lithium-ion battery, and accepted it as a confirmation of what I had read earlier. (That was when I decided that iRex had made
the right choice on the DR’s battery.) Your question caused me to look for the info, and I cannot find it (I don’t remember where it was, or even if it was online). In fact, I could not find
any pro/con comparison, regarding the two types, at all (I did find some very outdated info on the poly batteries, some of it published--or at least dated--this year). Bad information abounds, but I try to not spread it around, or add to the confusion; I will edit my post above, and
thank you.
That comment was aimed at the battery itself, not the DR’s soft/firm ware. The battery meter seems to have a memory effect of its own, and now I’m wondering if the DR had been rushing me to shut down because it only thought it was running out of battery. Oh, my...
And... at 11:00 AM saturday the DR showed 72% charge (after one week), and I have ended the test.
That’s enough for now; I’m
tired.
Kent Walters