Quote:
Originally Posted by Big D5
Nice post very well stated, now let me ask you some questions with your expertise you might be able to answer. All the Sprint PDA's that I have had have the same battery issues could the radio draw be related to EVDO? I have had PDA's since it was called just plain Windows CE those devices had great battery life even my last non converged devise the E-100 would go days between charges with the addition of the radio on these devices battery power really took a hit. HTC seams to have these devices figured out could the battery issues with all windows mobile converged devices be radio related and be being caused by the carrier added software that controls the radio I.E. not an HTC issue at all? I know its not just EVDO my Nephew has a Tilt GSM device and the battery on that device is right in line with all the outers. Have the makers of these devices set a battery usage verses all other aspects bench mark to hold? Why is the radio draw such a point of interest in your eyes when even the GSM devices have the same base line battery issues? If the battery issue you are tracking is the route cause of bad battery life in the Sprint TP why do all the other similar devices have the same problem?
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Based on what I have done this weekend (since I use my phone for work this is the first opportunity to COMPLETELY DISABLE all of the radios (airplane mode) and just use the Touch Pro as a PDA) Here is what I see. After a full charge Friday Night, I have not charged it. and still have 46% battery left as of 7pm EDT Sunday. That is with 8 hours of solid PDA use with the screen on (debugging a new app) and at least 3 hours in Power Mode D2 (unattended, Screen off but processor at full power).
That leads me to believe that the issues lie in the radio. My power usage diagnostics also show that during normal usage the power draw on the Battery is about 160mA, however whenever on a data or phone call the current draw jumps to over 500 mA.
So yes I beleive that the issues lie in the EVDO and phone Radios. From my understanding of the Qualcomm MSM platform, the radios are implemented using a separate ARM6 processor to generate the digital transmission signal for the integrated CDMA or GSM transmission hardware. The actual transmission hardware is slightly different based on flavor (and essentially the same as any standard GSM or CDMA phone), but what drives that hardware is primarily software based.
The basic software to drive the transmitter is very similar regardless of CDMA or GSM and will have to be tweeked for each carrier. Since all of the recent HTC devices have been based on essentially the same MSM platform, If I were doing the software development I would reuse the same code libraries from generation to generation (with any bug or required hardware changes). (
This next statement is solely speculation) So IF a bug entered in the early implementation for the chipset, it is likely to have made it through subsequent generations since in general most users will accept battery life as what it is and not ask why it is what it is.
However, with the systems I have had to design, I have always had to ask why I am using a given amount of power and what can be done to reduce it even further. So this is something I am used to analyzing with the software/hardware systems that I work on and why it just seemed natural for me to focus in on what was drawing the power.
I think I covered all of the questions that I can speak to....