Leave on cradle charging

[xeronex]

is it ok to leave my 51v on the cradle charging over night or longer with the screen on or will it damage it?

[Tankman]

Is it ok to leave my 51v on the cradle charging overnight or longer with the screen on or will it damage it?

Leave my Ax on the charger as well as a spare battery, charging almost 24/7. At times, I have left the Ax on, screen on, overnight many times. Usually, I turn the Ax off but, sometimes "sleep" sets in, I forget.

Never, I say never but, only had my Ax's 'bout four months, no screen problems. Ax X50 High and Ax X50v, both great.

If my ppc isn't in my pocket it is on the charger. I've left it for 24 hrs. many times over the past few years without any effect. I do have the backlight dim after 30 minutes when it is on power, allows it to charge faster.

[ExpungedBob]

is it ok to leave my 51v on the cradle charging over night or longer with the screen on or will it damage it?

My X50V is always in the cradle/charger and on. I set it to dim the screen after 20 minutes. I was concerned about the effect of leaving the screen bright and "on" all the time, and at work, I wanted some privacy as far as my reminders and calendar were concerned. After all, those were already happening on my laptop.

[Tankman]

Is it ok to leave my 51v on the cradle charging over night or longer with the screen on or will it damage it?

Spb Time, nice program, turns my Ax's screen into a nice desktop clock (screensaver). It's on almost all the time. No damage.

[Menneisyys]

is it ok to leave my 51v on the cradle charging over night or longer with the screen on or will it damage it?

It won't. It's backlit with LED's that never die, unlike, say, old sidelit iPAQ's.

[bhchesser]

Used an Axim for two years starting with an X3 and I have never had a problem leaving it in the cradle charging. Also no problems charging overnight by using a USB sync cable, wall charger, vehicle charger (All used at times overnight).

[gillius]

I have the Axim set to turn the backlight off (but not the screen) when plugged into AC power after 3 minutes. So the backlight won't stay on. This is good as cradle is in the room where I sleep. I figure that the lifetime on TFT is very long, but I know that backlights usually have an hour rating, but if the backlight is truly a LED as a previous poster said, then it would have extreme life. I think I have heard 80k to 100k hours for LED lights, which means it could be on 10 years or more straight never turning off before failure ;).

[Li0rE]

I leave it on for long periods of time too, at full brightness, never had a problem.

[sblive]

Looks like we have some gullible people out there who think that LED's are indestructible. I work for an optics company, and I regularly order LED's, probably a few thousand every year. I can tell you the failure rate is quite high, perhaps 5-10% of the LED's come dead-- no light at all. And if you think LED's will last good for 100,000 hours, someone brainwashed you. While it is true you can get output for a longer time than incadescent bulb, the 50k figure is not practical. Cheap LED's in consumer products will not last that long. And most LED's change color within 1000-2000 hours of use. That means if you left an LED all the time, within 1 to 2 years, you would see a noticeable change in color and light output will be dimmer. Go look at your alarm clock from 5 years ago. Surely the LED's are not as bright as they used to be.

Finally, I'm not even sure your Axim uses an LED bulb. If it does used LED's, it's likely that it uses an array of 20 or more LED's as one large LED is way to expensive for a pda. So if one of the LED's goes out, then your display will not look so nice.

That being said, just set your device to dim or turn off after 10 minutes and you should be okay for the useable lifetime of the axim (3-5 years). The biggest problem with leaving your pda on the cradle is the charging of the battery, but the battery is easily replaceable so it's not a big problem at all.

I have the Axim set to turn the backlight off (but not the screen) when plugged into AC power after 3 minutes. So the backlight won't stay on. This is good as cradle is in the room where I sleep. I figure that the lifetime on TFT is very long, but I know that backlights usually have an hour rating, but if the backlight is truly a LED as a previous poster said, then it would have extreme life. I think I have heard 80k to 100k hours for LED lights, which means it could be on 10 years or more straight never turning off before failure ;).

[gillius]

I have an alarm clock I got in middle school. I'm now graduated college and 24. It's LCD is darker for sure but bright enough. I'd guess that it's been going for about at least 8 years now?

I know for certain I brought it to college with me, and that was 1999, so it's at least 6 years old.

OK, so the 80k to 100k was a more or less random guess based on my very vague memory of something I saw quoted on a site. I tried to qualify my earlier statement with "I think," but I should have been a bit looser.

Still the LEDs should last in terms of years, not months, and in 2 years you are probably thinking about a new PDA and within 5 years I'm sure you've moved on. And the LEDs, unlike in an alarm clock, aren't going to be on 24/7 (you know you can turn the PDA off in the charger, too even without the auto backlight off).

Although, as a counter example, I don't believe LED traffic lights last in the order of years. But they are also exposed to "the elements".

Regardless, I'd expect the LEDs to outlive other components on the unit.

As for whether it actually has a LED backlight -- I don't know. I've never heard of LED backlights on LCDs, but I am far from an expert on the subject. I thought they were normally florescent tubes. But on the Axim I had wondered how they made it so small, and LED seems like a plausible explaination given my limited knowledge here.