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Guide To Designing Low Power Handhelds
randomErr writes "iAppliance had a nifty article about designing handhelds. As the state-of-the-art in low-power CPUs races forward, the CPU becomes one of the most critical components in the design of a handheld. New CPUs such as Intel's XScale, Alchemy Semiconductor's Au1000, and Transmeta's Crusoe provide the ability to scale clock frequency and voltage dynamically. As power consumption varies linearly with clock speed and as the square of core voltage, you'll want to have hardware hooks to be able to adjust both clock speed and voltage as necessary, based on device performance."
haldheld like those self-winding watches? Just move it around a little bit.....andit slowl charges it, now that would be awesome!!!
Great Linux Site
Palm systems are curently on top. They may only be B&W, but they get great battery life and do what most users need. Once you start entering the realm of music, that can be scaled over to an MP3 player instead of a Palm device.
However, once you start deciding to run higher end applications, give the machines net connects, etc. everything gets more complicated. Full color, integrated (or even unintegrated) 802.11b, sound and so on all drain batteries at an increased rate. My keyboard for my palmtop drains when it's plugged in, which is, obviously, why it's not plugged in all the time.
Battery life and functionality are both the keys. Is there a potential way to implement a self charging feature? Maybe harness the kinetic energy of movement to assist in charging the device? Most people with handhelds carry them everywhere. It wouldn't work well with high drain / low charge devices, like the Ipaq, Jornada, etc. which have charges of under 10 hours (at best) but maybe a system like this could achieve a few days or a week in a low drain device like a Palm m100.
I have no idea. Just a decidedly random thought that I had. Later.
I have to agree. While Graffiti is nice, I remember the Newton 2000 (2100? can't remember now) I carried about 4 years ago as part of an R&D project on the campus where I worked then. The thing read my cursive writing - and that's a major feat. Even though I'm good at Graffiti, I still have to focus too much on what my Visor thinks I've written to concentrate on what I need to write next. This inconsistency keeps me from using my Visor to take notes in class.
I'm wondering now what Apple plans to do with the Ink technology they're planning on building into OS X 10.2. While handwriting technology may be cool for a desktop computer, it would be a major coup for a handheld.
As for battery life, I generally replace my batteries every six weeks or so. I really don't consider this too frequent.
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
It is only a matter of time. The work on the software for speech and visual pattern recognition is being developed for so many other applications, the only requirement that the handheld device would need to add such features is more computing power. Of course, that is dependent on the overall electric power efficiency of the handheld.
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
A hack is just an idiom waiting for wider use.
I really like FastCPU for PalmOS. I run it on my Treo. Its great to be able to overclock slow apps from 33 MHz to 66 - it makes a helluva difference, and, it doesn't lock up all that often.
The other cool thing about it is that I can underclock things like notepad or "to-do list" so they use less battery power while running.