Battery life? Early adopters?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Gogolo

iRex, get this suspend thing on the way, now!

A "suspend" feature isn't going to help with "continuous use" battery life, which appears to be around 5-6h at present. That's worse than even the iLiad was .

[flyingtablet]

Originally Posted by HarryT

A "suspend" feature isn't going to help with "continuous use" battery life, which appears to be around 5-6h at present. That's worse than even the iLiad was .

For device with such a big screen, you expect readers to stay on a page
for quite some seconds, or even minutes.
So the suspend feature can be like this (a very very simple one):

display a page;
wait for 2-3 seconds (configurable);
go to suspend mode; (the screen REMAINS THE SAME!)
if a button is pressed, wake up and turn to another page.

[Gogolo]

You'r right. This will be the fact when scribbling. It raises my hackles (had to translate this from german).

Gogolo

[flyingtablet]

Originally Posted by Gogolo

You'r right. This will be the fact when scribbling. It raises my hackles (had to translate this from german).

Gogolo

If you are scribbling all day, it's like talking on your cellphone all day.
You get 4-6 hours talk time. Better get a large battery.
Or you can also go get some e-paper that is designed for scribbling.

The key feature of this device is "reading". That's why it is called
"Irex digital reader", not "Irex digital scribbler".
All other features are just add-ons and come at a price.

[Gogolo]

Okay, but for now the device runs out of battery after 5 hours doing nothing.

I hope they fix the suspend fast...

Gogolo

[Riocaz]

Don't hold your breath.

[Gogolo]

I didnt buy one yet...

Gogolo

[smp_iliad]

What suprised me is not that they didn't implement suspend in the first place, but the fact that they let cpu run 100% speed all the time. They experienced from iLiad what difference CPU throttling makes on battery life, but they didn't implement it. I guess they could easily achieve 10-15 hours with throttling only. 5 hours are just ridicuous!

[cjp]

Originally Posted by smp_iliad

5 1/2 hours ? wow, I can't believe it! If that's really so, I'll have to cancel my order. I've had iLiad and it lasts at least 12 hours...this is more than frustrating!

Do you read any PDF's on your iLiad? (Academic journal PDFs).
If indeed the DR1000s battery life is merely ~3-5 hours to simply read - digital reading is all I really need - very little writing, then I am trying to determine that if iRex says this is "normal" then should I go with the iLiad?
CJP

[Gogolo]

I read a lot of journals on my iLiad. Quite nice, although I use a lot of landscape mode and there sometimes I miss the overview, especially when having diagrams, footnotes etc. It's o.k., but I think the DR1000 will be a lot better for this purpose.

But this battery life sucks. I can't believe it.

Gogolo

[smp_iliad]

Originally Posted by cjp

Do you read any PDF's on your iLiad? (Academic journal PDFs).
If indeed the DR1000s battery life is merely ~3-5 hours to simply read - digital reading is all I really need - very little writing, then I am trying to determine that if iRex says this is "normal" then should I go with the iLiad?
CJP

yes, i read mostly academic papers on iLiad. If you're considering to switch to iLiad, you should be aware that 8.1 vs. 10.2 inches are huge difference. Reading academic papers on 8.1 inch screen is certainly ok, but that's not as good as reading printed A4 papers. i thought 10.2 inch would get us closer to the real size A4.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by cjp

Do you read any PDF's on your iLiad? (Academic journal PDFs).
If indeed the DR1000s battery life is merely ~3-5 hours to simply read - digital reading is all I really need - very little writing, then I am trying to determine that if iRex says this is "normal" then should I go with the iLiad?
CJP

Yes, I read journal articles in PDF form on my iLiad frequently. It works well, though multi-column pages are still kind of annoying. I have good vision, so I usually read in portrait mode, zoom to eliminate margins, and use the "continuous" page advance. If the text is too small, I switch to landscape mode. You might want to try taking a journal page and photocopying it to different sizes, and looking at it through an A5 window cut in a piece of paper or cardboard, to get an idea of what the screen will look like.

I have the earlier model (before the larger battery was added) and I get 8-10 hours of note-taking per charge, or probably about 12 hours of reading with no stylus use.

[ppxnouse]

Before I tunr into bashing Irex :
Can someone please measure the battery life when the Wacom pad is disabled ?!

Thank you

[allovertheglobe]

Originally Posted by ppxnouse

Before I tunr into bashing Irex :
Can someone please measure the battery life when the Wacom pad is disabled ?!
Thank you

I had mine turned off, same battery life. Which makes sense: In iRex's FAQ they say that at least that part is already implemented in the current firmware: it will automatically shut down IO devices not in use after a while.

But no CPU throttling, suspend to RAM etc. yet. They clearly state that the new hardware is much better at power-saving than the Iliad. They just haven't programmed in the functionality. The Iliad started off with (very) poor battery life as well, and not much hardware support, and they still managed to squeeze out ~12 hours of running time in the end, according to one post here.

If the Reader is at the same point, considering it's more powerful (and thus powerhungry), the running time (battery) is already better than the Iliad.

Hopefully IRex won't take a year or more to get the firmware to the maturity the Iliad has at this point...

[ppxnouse]

Originally Posted by allovertheglobe

They clearly state that the new hardware is much better at power-saving than the Iliad. They just haven't programmed in the functionality.

Unfortunately I can not trust iRex with that. I saw the same promises from iRex for the iLiad, and even the claimed 15h battery life were/are a bit less for a device that takes nearly a minute to boot up.

If the DR had 12-15h of battery power out of the box, I could live with that for now and hope for later firmware revisions to improve that, but 3-4 h of usage is a joke to me. Serious. My IBM tablet PC can be used for about 6-7 h if I only use it for reading and scribbling PDF with minimum back-light. Sure, it is heavier and a bit bigger and no e-ink, but... ?!