A little tough Love about battery issues.

[Palladium]

Since we are discussing background and qualifications, I have been writing software for and using PPC's since the days of Pocket PC 2000 (for the newbies, that is what WinMo used to be called 8 years ago). And design Online Monitoring systems (hardware and software) for process control equipment.

I have used more different devices that I can count. While this is my first move to the combination device platform. I well understand the power issues involved in these type of devices.

The power consumption of the PPC side of this device is similar to stand alone PDAs, In fact it is much better than the early XScale processor based devices. And as a PDA with all of the radios off power managment/usage on this device is as good as any PDA that I have written software for.

Where I part with the opinions of others on this board is in the issue of power consumption by the radios.

I have measured for better than a week and a half what I consider as excessive power draw by these radios. The radios on the Touch Pro have a maximum rated output of 0.29 watts of energy. However, the device draws 2+ watts of power to generate the 0.29 W of transmitted signal. By comparison, typical microwave (celluar) transmitters run between 50 and 75% efficent. This one is 13% efficent.

Regardless of whether these issues result in heating etc. It drains the battery much faster than it could (and should). My position and point since day 1 has been that work needs to be done to improve the efficiencies of these radios. If these radios worked as efficiently as what I have seen on the Qualcomm datasheets, We would be seeing 4-5 times the talk time with the same battery.

This is not something than can simply be done by tweeking the Radio parameters. This requires a more detailed look at the radio software to solve, something that no one here or at XDA can do, it requires acess to the source code and thus HTC.

[xweaponx]

Personally I believe Big D5 & Palladium are both accurate to summarize this thread; possible radio inefficency & larger processor size reduce battery life significantly. I have owned just about every PPC within HTC's lineup on Alltel, Sprint & Verizon and the battey life seems reasonably justified considering hardware, coverage, personal usage, charging habits and applications requiring active downloading/updating.

I learned with my 2nd PPC to always purchase (2) extra batteries & base charger; (1) battery in the car, (1) for work and (1) in my phone and the base charger replenishes any depleted batteries over night. This maximizes battery trained life and ensures optimized battery charge/discharge.

I have been untethered to a charger for years...