Slashdot Mirror
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."
Probably, but it may well be worthwhile paying off the loss in performance for greater ease and speed of development. They didn't have to write the kernel from scratch; though no doubt there have been some significant modifications.
the layman's guide to computer science
Oooh, that's nice, and I accept a plethora of comments to stream past about how we don't need this in a phone, and that a phone is a phone... But don't you just look at this and think "wow... we've come a long way". I know I do.
:)
A great phone by itself, with the addition of lotsa power, i'm liking it
Anonymous Coward
Those figures aren't impressive for a phone as all my phones in the past 3 years have lasted twice that long.
...this sounds like typical phone talk/standby times. And that's including the many Symbian phones out there, as well as the Treo's. Dunno what Hiptops do, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's in the same order.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Nowhere in the article does it say that linux is the reason behind the batteries long standby time. You might want to read it again.
Rock is Dead! Long live Paper and Scissors!!
Again, TFA says:
Does anyone know why Motorola keeps doing this? Isn't there a viable market for linux-based mobile phone in Europe or the US for example?
as an example of a phone that can do up to 300 hours on stand-by
Nokia 5140i
Linux is not competing against a simple kernel that simply goes to sleep. It is competing against Win CE, Symbian, etc. that ARE real oses as well. They have their own share of issues that are apparently much slower and/or more overhead.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When you try to use it, it texts you with the message "Can't find lib.so.8"
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.
I would imagine something without as many features to consume less power. I'd say it's not power-saving features of Linux, but rather a better battery and/or more power-efficient electronics as a whole.
see a Text Widget
Does it really matter what OS your phone is running? It's a closed system; you can't get at the internals.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
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 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.
The memory is 10MB, but TransFlash cards can be used - with cards up to 512MB available and compatible with the phone.
The OP says user-upgradable memory, which is quite not correct - the memory card is in addition to the 10MB but it's not a on-board upgrade. It's just an expansion - like in any other current smartphone or even featured phone in the market.
mount -t gsm /dev/gsm1 /tmp/.call -o number=1-555-3456 /tmp/.call/incoming /dev/speaker& ...
cp
if [ $caller==BOSS ] /dev/null
then
$call >>
fi
hilarious
will it be able to make phone calls?
...is this sort of power management a feature of typical Linux kernels? Who wrote it? Has LT reviewed it?
...are we really talking about an advanced low power processor which happens to run Linux?
...what is it about Linux that facilitates this low power consumption? Is it that the OS is free, so the development was cheap?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
While power management can be performed by an OS, the majority of power savings can come from efficient hardware design. Being a chip designer, I know that the power consumption of my device is not highly dependent on the OS I am running, but on how many fast switching transistors I put in the device.
Linux has nothing to do with the power consumption. Good hardware design along with good software (regardless of OS) to switch the device off when not in use is the key to long battery design.
Enough with the glorification of Linux (and OSes in general). Lets give a little attention to the good hardware design. Software people have the easy job. They can simply recompile when something doesn't work. I get my ass beat when we spend 50k on a chip that doesn't work right.
Will it require you to read the manpages to answer a call?
Cellphones with better battery life than Motorola's existed even four years ago. For instance, the Sony Ericsson T65i was the market leader in 2002 having a standby time of 300 hours and a talk time of 11 hours. In practice, I found that phone never lasted more than 200 hours standby and 6.5 hours talk time even with a brand new battery in an area with good reception close to a basestation. In areas with poor signal strength, standby was ~80 hours and talk time was ~3 hours. I expect Motorola's battery life figures fall off similarly quickly with signal strength.
Scroogle
Spelling matters.
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.
Mot licensed Qt/Embedded for their phones, but they do their own interface based on that, rather than using the Qtopia stack for phones
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.