start > 2008 > March > 17 > 001

Batteries

Created by ceej. Last edited by ceej Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:23:47 PDT. Viewed 596 times. atom feed
Craig Hockenberry, the dude who wrote Twitterific, writes about >>network activity eating the iPhone battery:

Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours. In fact, the first thing I said after giving Gruber this test version was “don’t use auto-refresh.”

I dug my Danger hiptop out of my messenger bag this morning. I'd left it on all weekend (as usual). Also as usual, my not-shipped Twitter app was running on it all weekend. It also polls for the Twitter data every five minutes. (JSON flavor, because xml is yucky.) My device still had battery life to spare. More than 50 hours of run time.

Except that there's gotta be something wrong with this story: the power management has got to be better than that. Or the prototype app was doing something exactly wrong to make radio behavior pessimal? Dunno. Or maybe it's the data size: most of my polls return not-modified, because I don't have a very active feed. I could drain the hiptop battery with constant huge data downloads, I suppose. Polling the public feed every five minutes would be an interesting test.

Push FTW either way.

ETA: Or imagine that cpu wake is expensive, and it sleeps every 3 minutes or something like that. Waking every 5 to poll would then be awful. But anyway, it's obvious that the iPhone is a device with a very different intent & direction than the hiptop is. Messaging-intensive vs media-intensive. I freakin' love that I pick my hiptop up, pop it out of keyguard, and find my email, IM messages, and tweets waiting for me.

alison : Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:34:12 PDT permalink
First off, I shake my tiny fists at your blog software.

Secondly, your twitter app is one of the killer apps for the hiptop, as far as I am concerned. It, IM, browser, and email are pretty much the only things I regularly use on it (and I use it heavily). It makes me sad that my friends (Ian being one) who use hiptops don't have it.

ONE DAY, WORLD, YOU WILL SEE ITS GREATNESS!

ceej : Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:44:01 PDT permalink
Some day I will give up and just move over to LJ. Except that LJ is now owned by Crazy Russians(tm) who are doing strange things.
alexr : Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:34:02 PDT permalink
ooh, ooh, please push your twitter app to trial.
haineux : Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:58:53 PDT permalink
"Just sitting there" the iPhone seems to last 2 days, maybe just under 3, tops, for Jen. I don't know what it does while the screen is black, it's just set to default.

I suspect the iPhone could have been 1mm thicker and had another day or two of battery life, but Someone said NOOOOOOO.

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