Quote:
Originally Posted by kdf9511
Lets see the PP uses a 400Mhz Arm processor and has 32mb of memory....I used to carry a HP Jornada 520 that used a 133Mhz SH3 with 16mb of memory and it had a much more precise and accurate battery meter. The ARM processor has a much better instruction set than the older SH3 processor. So this argument doesn't hold much water with me.
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Yeah, I used to carry one of those HP WinDoze machines too, and also the Palm variety, but I really hope that you do not think that you are really comparing apples to apples. Those devices did NOT use smart batteries, so they used an A/D converter on the main board to track battery use. That way, the OS had complete control over battery management.
In the case of the Hanlin readers, they chose the Smart Battery approach, so the battery state microcontroller is inside the battery packaging. I can guarantee you that the battery monitor is NOT a 400MHz ARM9 or anything even close. Since Hanlin chose the Smart Battery approach, no amount of complaining here about the reader software is going to change anything *meaningful* about the battery monitor since the monitor is inside the battery and not on the board with Hanlin's OS. I know that the monitor sends more than just a 2 bit resolution reading back to the main board, but the accuracy and linearity of the returned reading is still very poor. OpenInkpot on the V3 displays a percentage reading, but that reading is still non-linear and does not seem to be worth much more than 10% accuracy. Even then, the displayed values make some non-linear changes at the inflection points of the battery's charge/discharge curve. It is probably true that Hanlin could display a percentage scale with 1% resolution just as OpenInkpot does, but that does not mean that the accuracy would even come close to 1%.
All that being said, I do agree that I prefer OpenInkpot's method of showing the battery state.