Blackberry display technology?

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

"zoara" <me3@privacy.net> wrote in message news:1gi203z.9valk5thsxqaN%me3@privacy.net...
>
> From what I've seen, the colour Blackberry has an excellent screen (both
> indoors and out) and a battery life that colour Palm users will find
> astonishing.

Ah, battery life, a subject very dear to my heart. I'm afraid I don't have the
answers to your excellent question, but I have a question of my own. What
is the battery life of a colour Blackberry?

Well, maybe I could make some guesses at answers. What is the CPU in
the Blackberry? As I understand it, it is much more targetted at business
users so maybe the CPU isn't speced up to the level where it can play movies
and games. CPU really makes a huge difference to battery life. I just moved
from a Palm m515 to a Sony Clie TH55 and I've been looking at battery
life very carefully.

The Sony has a nice 320x480 screen and, since it doesn't have a slider like
the T3, the whole screen is always lit up (the T3 can do some power
optimization because when the slider is closed it doesn't light up the lower
320x160 pixels that are hidden). I don't know what the battery life of the
T3 is but I hear it isn't great. If you get 6 hours on-time from a charge I
hear that is pretty good going (is that about right?). Well, I'm using an app
called BatteryGraph to measure my on-time between charges and last night
my TH55 gave it's first battery warning (when the battery hit 10% charge)
after 14 hours and 18 minutes of on-time. I believe that the TH55's excellent
battery life is due to the CPU which, when the system isn't doing anything
too complicated, can clock itself down to 8MHz. Maybe the Blackberry
has similar features in its CPU.

- Julian

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

"zoara" <me3@privacy.net> wrote in message news:1gi493p.1ey7oofhr5qzpN%me3@privacy.net...
> Julian <nospam@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> > "zoara" <me3@privacy.net> wrote...
> > The Sony has a nice 320x480 screen and, since it doesn't have a slider like
> > the T3, the whole screen is always lit up (the T3 can do some power
> > optimization because when the slider is closed it doesn't light up the lower
> > 320x160 pixels that are hidden).
>
> Actually, that's a misconception; the backlight is still on behind the
> slider, it's just that the pixels are black. You can tell, because the
> very edges of the screen have no pixels (check games etc; they always
> have a white border [1]) and if you check under the slider it has a
> black border.

That doesn't suprise me. At one point when I was seriously considering the
T3 I posted the question about whether the bottom third was lit when the
slider was closed and a few people assured me it wasn't. That did suprise
me a bit since I would have thought it quite hard not to. I ended up not
getting a T3 so I didn't really care in the end.

> > I don't know what the battery life of the T3 is but I hear it isn't great.
> > If you get 6 hours on-time from a charge I hear that is pretty good going
> > (is that about right?).
>
> Halve that and you're more accurate. I think it's around 3.5 hours;
> that's what I get from my T|E and the brief time I spent with the T3
> seemed about the same.

Yeah. That's what I thought but I didn't want to be accused of selling the T3
short so I thought I'd err strongly on the generous side. It is battery life that
took the T3 out of contention for me. I got spoiled by my first Palm (Palm V)
and have been trying to get back to where I started (battery life wise) ever
since.

> > and last night my TH55 gave it's first battery warning (when the battery
> > hit 10% charge) after 14 hours and 18 minutes of on-time.
>
> Excuse me, but ******* ****!

Yup. No typo! The battery life is good. I do have the backlight on very low,
about 20% and it is dimmer like-for-like than a TE or T3 so on a Tungsten I
would say that the backlight would only be at about the 10% level.

> I wish my T|E was anywhere near 14 hours. I might consider a Sony for my
> next upgrade...

Unfortunately you'll need to be quick. Sony bought out the closest thing to the
perfect PDA with the TH55 (in my opinion) and then a few months later
announced that they were stopping production outside Japan so the TH55
is now a dissappearing item in Europe and North America. Sony also made
the curious decision to not put Bluetooth in the model they sold in North
America so it is only the European spec that has both 802.11b and Bluetooth
networking.

> > I believe that the TH55's excellent battery life is due to the CPU which,
> > when the system isn't doing anything too complicated, can clock itself
> > down to 8MHz.
>
> That's clever. A lot of laptop CPUs do that, don't they...?

Yes, they do. From my experience of how 15 minutes of playing Bejewelled
compares with an hour of ebook reading in terms of battery drain (they're
about the same), I think that the CPU load does make a huge difference to
battery life.

- Julian