Battery experience with firmware v4.1.7729

[Zaroff]

I wonder if the artificial, progressive shutting down of the lighting has anything to do with the device not going to sleep immediately after closing the flap. It acts the same as pressing the back button, which produces that effect too. I mean, it's pretty and all but isn't that counterproductive?

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by jiminrussell

But the screen is capacitive touch isn't it, an inanimate object like the cover shouldn't trigger a touch event should it? And yet it seems to do just that.

I find if I let the bottom right part of the cover touch the screen first it goes to sleep fine but if I just flip it closed without paying attention to what part touches the screen first I some times end up with selected text or on a different page, usually forward one page but sometimes back a page, but not seeing the large battery drain some others are seeing (at least not so far since updating to 4.1.7729).

This is the sort of thing I am thinking of. If something is touching the screen and triggering an action when the sleep is triggered, it might be interfering with the sleep. This happened with an old firmware on the other devices.

For the capacitive touch, as you can use a stylus, it doesn't have to be a body part doing the touch. And it can take affect through other material. So, if the wrong material was used in the cover, or it was to thin, then touching the cover before the touch is disabled, could trigger a touch action.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Zaroff

I wonder if the artificial, progressive shutting down of the lighting has anything to do with the device not going to sleep immediately after closing the flap. It acts the same as pressing the back button, which produces that effect too. I mean, it's pretty and all but isn't that counterproductive?

The device does several things while going to sleep. At the very least, it should be writing any changes to the database (such as the current reading position, start and end of current reading session). And if you are reading a purchased kepub, it will also try to sync the current reading position to the server. In past firmware, the light was turned off immediately. This was changed to the end. Now, they are fading it out. So long as the overall order of actions is correct, then it won't how they turn the light out. In this case, I've been suspecting the touch is disabled to late, but with the design of of the official cover, it will be hard to guarantee that touches aren't being registered when the magnet in the cover triggers the sleep.

[ratinox]

Just wanted to add my few pennies to this.

In my case, something lingering from the 4.0 firmware remained after I installed 4.1.7729 and continued to cause severe battery drain. This went away after a factory reset and immediate installation of 4.1.7729. So, if you're still having problems after the update then try a factory reset and install the update against a stock ONE.

[YarnerT]

I'm thinking of buying the Aura One. I'm in Canada and Indigo has them in stock online while Kobo is out of stock until November 1st. With the battery issue some are having, would it be better to wait and buy directly from Kobo just in case, or does it really matter? Will the ones from Kobo be a new batch, or exactly the same do you think?

Thanks!

[koboy]

Originally Posted by YarnerT

I'm thinking of buying the Aura One. I'm in Canada and Indigo has them in stock online while Kobo is out of stock until November 1st. With the battery issue some are having, would it be better to wait and buy directly from Kobo just in case, or does it really matter? Will the ones from Kobo be a new batch, or exactly the same do you think?

Thanks!

i believe if you do enough reading up on the KA1 on this forum you certainly would be wise not to buy one at the moment, but of course the choice is completely yours.

best wishes koboy

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by YarnerT

I'm thinking of buying the Aura One. I'm in Canada and Indigo has them in stock online while Kobo is out of stock until November 1st. With the battery issue some are having, would it be better to wait and buy directly from Kobo just in case, or does it really matter? Will the ones from Kobo be a new batch, or exactly the same do you think?

Going by the reports in this forum, it seems that for many users, the 4.1.7729 firmware update has corrected their battery issues. For others, it hasn't. One item that I have noticed is that a drop of 6-7% during an hours reading is normal -- Kobo used a smaller battery in the KA1 to keep the weight down and their rating is the battery is good for 1 month reading at 30 minutes per day or around 15 hours compared to the 2 months/30 hours for their older ereaders. For me, this has meant plugging in more often than I am used to -- 2-3 times per week instead of once. But then my Nexus tablet and iPhone want to be charged pretty much everyday so nothing new in that.

There are complaints from some about colour blotches on the screen and uneven lighting. So far, I haven't seen that issue on 3 KA1s but if you are purchasing it from Chapters/Indigo, you might want to check for a B&M store near you that has stock and checking the screen as soon as you can.

Overall, I'm quite happy with my KA1 and it's screen and remain hopeful that the oddities I'm still noticing will be corrected in upcoming firmware updates. At this point, most of the oddities seem connected to the sleep cover where, erratically, closing and opening the cover seems to trigger screen touches. It almost makes me wish Kobo had stuck with a raised bezel to keep the sleep cover away from the screen.

[rashkae]

I would buy it from Best Buy. Gives you 2 weeks to decide if you want to keep it.

[pickyaxe]

4 days with my Aura One, no rapid battery drain so far.

I did get a ridiculous amount of database corruptions on the first day, but that's unfortunately a Kobo sqlite problem and not specific to the One.

edit: looks like I spoke too soon. Lost over 20% in 4 hours of standby.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by pickyaxe

4 days with my Aura One, no rapid battery drain so far.

I did get a ridiculous amount of database corruptions on the first day, but that's unfortunately a Kobo sqlite problem and not specific to the One.

I have to ask, what where you doing? I ask this because, in my experience, the database doesn't corrupt easily. I am constantly connecting and reconnecting my four devices to PC, running calibre against them, directly querying and updating the database. I don't really know how many times I have connected them in the last week but, I'd say at least 20 times last night. In the last week, I have had one database corruption and that was because I bumped the cable out. In the month before, only one other corrupted database across the devices. Total for this year, less than 10.

So, while I understand that the database can be corrupted, I find the idea that it is to be expected to happen frequently strange. I just don't see it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by YarnerT

I'm thinking of buying the Aura One. I'm in Canada and Indigo has them in stock online while Kobo is out of stock until November 1st. With the battery issue some are having, would it be better to wait and buy directly from Kobo just in case, or does it really matter? Will the ones from Kobo be a new batch, or exactly the same do you think?

Thanks!

The battery problem is a software issue, not a hardware issue. So waiting isn't going to make any difference to the hardware. The issues have been fixed in the latest firmware.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I have to ask, what where you doing? I ask this because, in my experience, the database doesn't corrupt easily. I am constantly connecting and reconnecting my four devices to PC, running calibre against them, directly querying and updating the database. I don't really know how many times I have connected them in the last week but, I'd say at least 20 times last night. In the last week, I have had one database corruption and that was because I bumped the cable out. In the month before, only one other corrupted database across the devices. Total for this year, less than 10.

So, while I understand that the database can be corrupted, I find the idea that it is to be expected to happen frequently strange. I just don't see it.

I've never had a corrupted database. I've always ejected and waited about 20 seconds before removing the USB cable. I wait like 30 seconds after the books are added to the database before doing anything. I may be being overly cautious, but given no corruption, I'll stay doing what I do.

[LuckyL]

right, after there seems no equivalent reader and the firmware is available, I gave it another shot.
This unit is perfect (screen alignment, uniformity of backlight) and of the second batch, however, this too has the battery drain in sleep mode and discharges over night.
I contacted Kobo support who responded with

"Thank you for contacting Rakuten Kobo Customer Care and reporting about battery life on their Aura One eReader issue, a release to address this will be available sometime in November."

Awaiting more details but I'm pretty frustrated by now

[Zaroff]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The issues have been fixed in the latest firmware.

No they haven't.

[pickyaxe]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I have to ask, what where you doing?

Actually, today I found out that it's not database corruption. I'm using OS X and for some reason, ejecting the device sometimes doesn't trigger a database refresh (regardless if ejecting via Calibre or via OS X's diskutil).

Then the Aura One starts thinking it has an empty database. The calibre KoboTouch driver will report that the database is corrupt. At that point no amount of connecting USB/mounting/dismounting would trigger a refresh. This can be solved by rebooting, then mounting/dismounting, which finally refreshes. However, this database "loss" happens quite a lot. At one point I did not do the reboot+refresh thing and Nickel eventually did a spontaneous factory reset.

Could it be an issue with fmon?