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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."
When you try to use it, it texts you with the message "Can't find lib.so.8"
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)
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.