Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
I wasn't really complaining - mostly because I've got nothing to compare it with since it's my first ereader. And it was a kind of genuine question - what - other than keeping the clock going - is it doing when it isn't doing anything such that it would presumably go from full to empty in a couple of weeks. Or, to put it another way, what's the difference, from the DR800's point of view, between being asleep - which it can be - and being off - which it can't.
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Sorry, didn't mean to get jumpy. The topic of iRex battery life has a long and colorful history, it's been a big issue with them until now. It was a knee jerk "here we go again" reaction on my part, sorry about that.
It probably keeps the CPU going in order to respond to buttons (although throttled way down) as well as keeping power to the memory in order to maintain the state of the OS and open books, etc. The primary advantage is the recovery time, along with other benefits like resuming where you left off, etc.
Technically it can go "off", but it only does so when the battery gets low in order to prevent it from being fully drained. Under normal conditions when you flip the power switch it's going to be in sleep. If it takes it a couple seconds to start back up, then you know it was in sleep mode. If it does a complete bootup (40 - 50 seconds), including the opening logo, then it was really off.
It would be nice if the user had the option to tell it to shutdown instead of go to sleep for when you know you're not going to be using it for a long time, and accept the trade off of a much slower startup time. There isn't any way to do that currently, at least not that I know of, other than letting it sit long enough where the battery gets to the point that it automatically shuts itself down. Still, I think most people would much rather have it this way, than the previous way where you had to do a shutdown/startup every time you wanted to use the device. At least, that's been the overwhelming feedback in the past.