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Linux-Based Phone Lasts 200 Hours on Standby
An anonymous reader writes "Motorola is showing off a Linux/Java phone with a claimed battery life of 200 hours on standby, or 200-250 minutes when talking. If those figures prove true, Linux sure is improving quickly on the power management front. That kind of battery life also suggests that the E895 might be the first single-chipset phone ever to run a complex OS, whether Symbian, Windows Mobile, or Linux. Other features are user-upgradable memory, 1.3MP camera, video capture, multimedia slideshows, and more. Hopefully a more U.S.-friendly version will follow, as happened when Mot's Linux-based quad-band A780 came out a year or so after it's tri-band forebear, the A768, shipped in China."
... wont' something non-Linux, something smaller and more efficient, give longer talk time?
Those figures aren't impressive for a phone as all my phones in the past 3 years have lasted twice that long.
as an example of a phone that can do up to 300 hours on stand-by
Nokia 5140i
My Philips Xenium 9@9++ has a standby time of about a month. No useless toy features (camera, color display, ...).
Granted, I don't phone that much, but it's nice to have a device that doesn't need be be recharged every other day/week.
At this time, The American market is slowing down. All the tech toys go to the far east as they have a much better economy. Sadly, our economy has been in stall for 5 years and not looking better due to the oil price instabilities.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So, a phone runs Java or Linux as it's OS... unless I get access the system's internal files, and modify it how I want to, I'm not going to get too hot and bothered over this.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
I remember thinking that my Nokia 5165 was really great at the time, but this is really revolutionary. I mean, just 5 years ago, monochromatic displays and bulky designs were the norm. Even my baseline Sony Ericsson T237 is a massive leap forward. With Linux on the Motorola phones, it really makes you think about where the industry is headed. Now, if you can access X-terminal and run OpenOffice, then I'd see about getting one. How many phones can you go rm-r on? Not many.
And they wonder why I left Windows.....
I seems there are at least 4 totally isolated dev teams at Motorola.
They have
1. Multiband Phones running Linux (A780, this one, etc)
2. UMTS phones running Symbian UIQ (A1000, E1000, etc)
3. Clamshell-Phones running Windows Mobile (MPx220...)
4. and finally the ultra slim phones running Motorola's own OS (RAZR V3...)
Wow. Compare this to Nokia, they have about 3 basic setups with 50 different designs.
(I know this will never get seen but...) I remember back in the day there was an article on here (slashdot) about how Apollo-Era scientists would kill to have our cell phones- not because of the communications, but because of the processors in them. Think about it- There's PocketPC's out there that rival the speed of the iMac i'm posting from.
Tim says: "please mod me up so my karma won't be terrible. Please?"
They will have to provide the Linux source code build used, including the modifications they made if any. Most likely the phone comes with a CD, and somewhere in the pile of paperwork etc. associated with the phone it explains that you can find your source code on the CD.
They aren't obliged to make it any easier for you to put your own hacked Linux on the phone than it was for them to put their version on it, e.g. you may need to open up the phone and use custom I/O connectors to flash it. But most likely there will be a Windows utility that writes checksummed romfs images or something so that they can upgrade it more easily.
Of course it's possible that they screwed up and will have to be persued for the code, in which case no doubt Slashdot will cover that in its usual uninformed way.
Unfortunately that's just speculation, so I agree with the grand parent. I love submissions based on a 1 sentence speculation of an article.
And the battery life is still not impressive, which makes the one sentence irrelevant.
While I agree with your fundamental point, I'm a software engineer at Mot, and you can get a BASH prompt on the thing - you can also telnet and ssh into it. Granted, this isn't available to the average customer, its still cool. In addition many of the system services are run with SysV style init script. I don't know that anyone's actually done it, but there is speculation that we could make the phone software run on a regular PC, if we did a little emulation of a few hardware components. This is very useful for testing and debugging.
I actually think that having a 'real' OS on the phone is a big step. If you could see the code for the current OS used on most Motorola phones today, you would appreciate what a step forward going to Linux really is.
A long way from what? I don't see this phone curing cancer, getting us to Mars, solving world hunger, balancing budgets, or preventing wars. It's a neat gizmo, but it's no milestone of human achievement. Oh, waiter, one order of perspective please!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
The GPL does offer the right to anyone using the software (on the phone) to read the code. The distribution and apps from Trolltech (and others) may not be licensed so. Either way there's got to be enough GNU tools used, so the non-average user can try and tweak it the way they like it (voiding warranty of course.)
If there are such possibilities than calling out "linux,linux,linux" might have some significance. Else, I'd rather not care about the OS/Platform/Chipset and just hope that the phone delivers the features it promises.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
In other news, the new Linux phone lasted the same as the best Windows phone when the both phones were powered off..
What a bunch of fucking bullshit!
>If those figures prove true, Linux sure is improving quickly on the power management front.
It means Motorola's drivers and other code have improved.
And so fucking what anyway? Am I supposed to ditch my current phone just because this piece of shit can standby 200 hours?
While reading the article I came across this quote:
"Such stellar battery life suggests the E895 might be based on a single-chipset architecture, "
If I read that correctly it sounds like they don't know if was built on the single chipset or not.
I appears that the "author" does not have access to anything more than publicity manual. I would think that they could claim that this thing cures cancer, stops wars and ends world hunger...and no one would really know.
That being said, I would love to see this thing reviewd by someone who has kicked one of these things around for a couple of months. Which brings on my second gripe --
"Availability
The E895 is expected to be initially introduced in the Asia-Pacific region in Q4 of 2005."
I guess it does not really matter, because it will never make it to our shores -- and if it does, it won't be until we have flying cars and they find some way to increase the price and reduce the features. This is about the 10th cool gadget I have seen this month that I will never get to purchase in person, or as the case with cellphones, even if I could purchase -- I would never get to use without moving to Tokyo.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.