Pocket Edge Battery Life, what is typical

Very excited to get the PE off of Woot. I was hoping to replace my nook with it. An e-reader with some android love added on.

I seem to have very short battery life on my PE - it seems to drop suddenly while doing nothing/hibernating. I have only had this a few days, so I'm just going to relate my experiences a bit. I'm also updated to Ermine.

Entourage states: You can read books for more than 7 hours if you turn off the
tablet screen. If you are using both screens, the Pocket eDGe battery will last
approximately 4 hours.

I noticed yesterday the power dropping under 5 hours after an overnight charge and closed/hibernating, but I wasn't tracking it that closely.

Today I had the PE charge overnight till 1pm. Then I read for about 30 minutes and closed it up. I had it in airplane mode with wifi and bluetooth disabled. It showed full charge. When I opened it back up again at 6pm, it was in the orange and demanding I connect my charger.

I connected the charger till 10pm and it said it was charged. The device still has all the wireless disabled. The book I was reading was already on the e-ink screen. I disconnected it from the charger and would read off and on (at work), never activating the tablet side. To pause reading, I would just set the tablet down. The e-ink continues to display the page I was on, but no buttons were being pressed.

A little before 2AM, I got the "please connect your charger" beep. It wasn't quite into the orange, but it was close.

I also notice that the green light next to the charging port remains on constantly (except when the charger is connected, then it blinks). Is this common?

What does Entourage mean when they say "you can read for 7 hours"? Does that mean actively reading/turning pages (perhaps annotating with the stylus)? Or does it mean it can display a page for 7 hours with no other activity?

One other thing I've noticed is that since I connected it to USB two days ago, it has been showing the USB connection in the notification bar. I have disabled USB storage. I also have not been connected to USB for over 24 hours. Perhaps that is draining battery?

I am going to try powering off the PE completely and letting it charge fully today to see if that changes anything, but wanted to get others opinions on this. It seems rather low. My Droid-X doing all manner of wifi/gps/3g/etc can run 2 days without charge. The PE, with using the e-ink screen (and not even the whole time), it gets close to dead within 5 hours.

That is not typical. I have gone 5 days between charges of the PE, using just eink and going into hibernation.

Sorry, I just saw that you said you'd upgraded. It sounds like there may be some process that's continuing to run even after you close the PE.

Originally Posted by soawesomejohn

VOne other thing I've noticed is that since I connected it to USB two days ago, it has been showing the USB connection in the notification bar. I have disabled USB storage. I also have not been connected to USB for over 24 hours. Perhaps that is draining battery?

Try pulling down the notification bar and clicking "Clear".

I doubt that is affecting your battery time, though.

I worked with the LCD side for about 4 hours yesterday and had about 1/4 charge left. It seemed a bit low, but I'm not sure what to expect. So far it seems to be about the same as my HP netbook.

HTH,

Kirk

I upgraded to Ermine (Froyo) and although Pandora insists on auto-loading, I can still hibernate my PE for six hours and hardly notice any battery level drop.
I'd let the battery drop all the way down, then charge it (while shut off) overnight a few times. Maybe you can reset the battery and get more time out of it?

So I powered the edge off completely (or as completely as the power button allows), charged it for a few hours, then turned it back on shortly after 6AM (Eastern). It was showing a full charge at this point. I closed it and left it charge till 2pm. I did use the e-ink to read for about 2 solid hours. When I checked it at 3PM battery status was 89% and again now at 6PM, it shows the battery status at 81%. I have also been keeping it closed when not in use, so I get the "in hibernation" notice on the e-ink screen.

I'm going to check it again in a few hours and I'll let you know what I see then. But for now, I've had 4 hours off the charger with heavy reading use and a 20% drop in battery.

@woodnboats: The usb connection notification is the one you see when you have the usb cable connected. It can't be cleared, but it is supposed to go away when not connected. The power cycle cleared it. There is a possibility that it was keeping a chip or two powered on, but I'm not familiar enough with the device to say that's the case.

Re the USB connection icon: I got that yesterday after I hooked up to my laptop to transfer some books. I realized that I had forgotten to do a proper disconnect from the laptop before shutting off the USB connection on the PE. Could that be why it kept showing in your notification bar? When I'm doing things "properly" I use either the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in Windows or the "Eject Device" tab in Calibre to disconnect before I tell my PE to shut down the USB connection and then pull the plug.

Am I correct in thinking this is the best method?? I'll try it again later and see if that USB icon in the notification bar does NOT appear.

I used the edge to read for 6 hours yesterday at work and on a short road trip with probably an hour or 2 so of wifi surfing on wikipedia mixed into that and I still had over 60% of my battery left. I disabled BT on mine since I never use it and I use the power control widget to quickly turn the wifi on and off for when I need it and I keep the screen relatively dim, but bright enough for me.

I've drained it to about 50% after about 3 hours of heavy wifi use on the android side, downloading and installing apps and listening to pandora.

\I've been quite happy with my battery times Hope you figure your problem out.

Today it worked out much better.

I got the low battery beep around 5:20am after taking it off the charger around 2pm the previous day.

I went to the battery status and looked at those.
Time since unplugged: 15hr 1m 15s. Battery level: 13%
eDGe Idle "battery used by cell radio" (15h 1m 15s): 87%
eDGe Idle "battery used when phone is idle" (14h, 1m, 4s): 12%
Dispplay (59m) 2%

So I guess that covers 101% of my battery usage. I like how the PE has two entries for "eDGe Idle", and both of them refer to a cell phone.


For the bulk of this time, I was using it for reading, but I did pop it on a few times to connect usb and transfer files. I also connected it for a wifi for a few minutes to synchronize email and Flick Note (android app for Simple Note, very useful).

This is better than I was seeing up until this point. It's not as good as alex_edge's "5 days between charges" though. I would be happy with 2 days though. Hopefully it just needs more draining and recharging to get back up to snuff.

Generally it seems it takes a few cycles for the battery to 'break in".

Originally Posted by soawesomejohn

Today it worked out much better.

I got the low battery beep around 5:20am after taking it off the charger around 2pm the previous day.

I went to the battery status and looked at those.
Time since unplugged: 15hr 1m 15s. Battery level: 13%
eDGe Idle "battery used by cell radio" (15h 1m 15s): 87%
eDGe Idle "battery used when phone is idle" (14h, 1m, 4s): 12%
Dispplay (59m) 2%

So I guess that covers 101% of my battery usage. I like how the PE has two entries for "eDGe Idle", and both of them refer to a cell phone.


For the bulk of this time, I was using it for reading, but I did pop it on a few times to connect usb and transfer files. I also connected it for a wifi for a few minutes to synchronize email and Flick Note (android app for Simple Note, very useful).

This is better than I was seeing up until this point. It's not as good as alex_edge's "5 days between charges" though. I would be happy with 2 days though. Hopefully it just needs more draining and recharging to get back up to snuff.

It sounds as though you are using yours far more heavily than I did in those 5 days. As I had said in that post, I was reading on the ink side (tablet off) about 1.5 hours per day, and did perhaps a maximum of 20 mins of tablet-based stuff per day. But I have been really impressed with battery conservation in hibernation mode: I am not exaggerating when I say I only lose about 2% of battery power overnight when hibernating.

Originally Posted by Gunnerp245

Generally it seems it takes a few cycles for the battery to 'break in".

Ah! I hope this is what it is for mine... I haven't monitored my usage as closely yet, but in the 3 days of playing with it I have noticed a fall in battery pretty quickly...

I will try the "drain till empty before charging" for the next couple of times...

Thank you!

Originally Posted by Kewlcat

Ah! I hope this is what it is for mine... I haven't monitored my usage as closely yet, but in the 3 days of playing with it I have noticed a fall in battery pretty quickly...

I will try the "drain till empty before charging" for the next couple of times...

Thank you!

You are only going to get the improved battery life that people are talking about with Ermine--Dingo was a notorious battery suck.

Originally Posted by alex_edge

You are only going to get the improved battery life that people are talking about with Ermine--Dingo was a notorious battery suck.

No!! not another reason to upgrade to Ermine!!

OTOH, I did monitor my usage yesterday evening a bit more carefully & got about 3 hours usage on the tablet side with Wifi on...& battery seemed to reduce only by 40%

Not sure if thats normal, but for now its good enough for me...

Will need to check 'ereader only' usage some other time...

I updated to ermine as soon as I finished unpacking my PE. I have noticed that the automatic hibernate function (close the device up) doesn't work more than about 5% of the time. If I close it and it doesn't hibernate the battery runs down in a matter of 5-6 hours. When the PE is truly in hibernate mode the green led next to the power switch flashes on every 5 seconds or so. If the light is on continuously, the device is not hibernating.

I have to flick the power switch and select the "hibernate" option from the menu in order to get it to hibernate reliably. So far I haven't had any problems with it coming out of hibernation.

I have also had a problem with the device thinking that it is still connected to my computer via USB even when it is not. I find that after ejecting the device via either Calibre or Windoze, then stopping USB storage on the device, then unplugging the USB cable, the status bar still reports a USB connection. I don't know if it takes any extra power or not.