Battery Life

[alert5]

Just finished a little unscientific, experiment to test how bad the impact is on battery life using a Linksys WFC12.

At 9:05AM I turned on my fully charged Axim with the WiFi in the CF slot. This card connected within a couple of seconds with a reading of about 65% link quality and 85% signal strength.

I then started ActiveSync 3.6 and began various tasks. Loaded some lit files, installed ietools and surfed the WEB a bit. These operations are quite speedy using WiFi which really makes me happy with the WCF purchase.

My Axim is set to full brightness on battery power and is set to go idle after three minutes. During this test the Axim did go into idle a number of times, but I was exercising it quite a bit.

I got my first power warning at 11:00AM and the battery indicated 20% remaining.

I continued to use the device until the second power warning at 11:20AM and the battery was down to 10% remaining. That's 2 hours, 15 minutes by my math on a standard Axim battery.

I shut down and replaced the battery with my backup battery which I had fully charged a couple of days ago. When I restarted, the new battery indicated 91% charge remaining. Hmm, evidently the Axim batteries discharge slowly even when not in use?

I continued the same drill with the same settings. Actually I used the device even more intensively.

I got the 20% warning on the second battery at 1:05PM or roughly and hour and 40 minutes after the restart.

The 10% warning occurred 20 minutes later. So I got 2 hours of use from a 90% initial charge, which is consistent with the first fully charged battery's life.

I would conclude from this that if you were on a five hour Luthansa flight with WiFi available, you would probably have enough juice for the entire hop on two standard Axim batteries. On a trip from JFK to Tokyo though, you'd be out of luck.

Still not bad and hopefully those Dell super-batteries will drop in price given time.

[LeapinLew]

Awesome post Alert. I was wondering - and unscientific tests work fine by me. I'll run my Netgear through a test - soon as I get my access point up.

[Fritz]

I have a WCF12 setup also. I find that surfing the web and icqing isn't so bad on the batteries -- but when you do heavy transfers like huge files n stuff, that's when it puts a lot of drain on it. This morning I was doing some testing for another reason (refer to the thread about Formatting SD cards). I must have transfered these 6MB and 12MB files back and forth at least 40 times between desktop and my Ax; and transfered from SD to Ax internally at that amount also. I racked about 3.5 hrs of usage before it went down to 3%

[NMkiD]

Did you check the "Power save enabled" feature?

I found that this saves a hell of a lot of battery life, it was draining my battery Alot when I first tried it yet with this feature on it seemed to have laster longer. Now with my 3400 battery on it I can surf the web for a logn time, maybe I'll give it a try and post some time benchmarks as well. but dont hold me ot that heh.

[b9_2mr]

I am grateful for everybody that posts information into this topic, I have an axim on the way but I already have WCF12 ready and waiting to use with it, and knowing whether or not I should take the power adapter to school with me will be impacted by the tests you guys are doing.