Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Russell
They seem to be claiming 6-7 hrs with the std battery and 11-12hrs with the extended battery...
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The AMD Geode is one of the lowest power x86 cpus, but also one of the slowest (although it does have some hardware support for 2-D graphics). Battery life depends on the capacity of the battery (which has not been released), but Chippy at UMPC Portal reports 4 hrs web browsing on the standard battery and estimates 6 hrs for video playback and 10 hrs for audio only. He is usually conservative when rating battery life.
There is no comparison in software availability between an x86 processor and any non-x86 alternative. Almost every software e-book reader has a Windows XP version for example. All mainstream software packages run under Windows and even the OpenSource candiates often require x86 (FireFox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice). The Pepper Pad 3 has a 500 MHz Geode processor and runs Linux, but it has no trouble running FireFox, Adobe Reader, and OpenOffice (the latter runs better with 512 MB or more of memory). On low performing x86 processors and small screens the trick is to run one application at a time. Multitasking tends to be a strain on memory capacity and cpu power.