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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."
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?
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"
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?
The point is it only needs 1000mAh battery. Sure, if I have four batteries, I have standby time _four_ times as long as you.
Iff you checked the capacity of your battery and decided that your phone indeed must have lower consumption then the new phone then you have to check whether your phone runs an OS that's in the same category as Linux and _only then_ can you claim it's not impressive.
(I'm not saying you must be wrong. I'm just saying that you may be comparing apples to PCs, ooops, sorry apples to oranges)
My 2 year old siemens s55 gets 10days-2weeks standby with a 740mAh battery.
Like the greatparent said: the phone is absolutly NOTHING to write about (except LINUX LINUX LINUX LINUX... its slashdot, alright...)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
if [ $caller==BOSS ] /dev/null
then
$call >>
fi
hilarious
will it be able to make phone calls?
Will it require you to read the manpages to answer a call?
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.