Quote:
Originally Posted by Khendron
 I finally understand why there is an OFF button. It seemed redundant (the Kobo doesn't use any power just sitting there) until I put the Kobo in my backpack for a while. When I pulled it out again, it had flipped back about 50 pages and drained most of the battery. I am now careful to turn my Kobo off before packing it away. |
Just a note on this from an engineering point of view:
The Kobo DOES use power when powered on and just sitting there. While the advantage of eInk screens is they don't need power to maintain an image after the initial "burn", you gotta consider the device as a whole. The screen might not need power just sitting there, but the underlying microprocessor driving the device is still running, albeit in an idle state. The device still needs to respond to button presses, poll battery status, and few other small things you can chalk up to 'an OS doing its thing'.
When compared to the power it takes to "flip a page", the drain on the battery in this idle state is relatively small, but it IS still present.
I would be curious to learn what the actual numbers are in regards this. Specifically, how long would the device need to idle to use the same amount of power as powering on and loading a book?
ya know, knowing if I'm not going to be reading for X hours, it's better to turn the device off