yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
I was almost 100% sold on the Polaris as my next device but battery life is very important to me. I currently have an HTC P3300 (well, O2 XDA Orbit) and with the increased battery capacity of the Polaris (1350mAh vs 1200mAh in my Orbit) plus the claimed better specs from HTC (GSM 7 hours talk/400 hours standby for the Touch Cruise vs 3.5-5 hours talk/150-200 hours standby for the P3300) I really hoped that HTC had dodged any battery life issues.

I just found this review however (http://www.mobile88.com/mobilegallery/phonereview.asp?phone=HTC_Touch_Cruise&pg=review&prodid=20785&cat=37) and it has me worried. The bit I'm worried about is right at the bottom of the page:

<Start of summary of review results>

The multimedia cycle tests in comparison to the results demonstrated by the original Touch and P3300 are given below:

Multimedia-cycle, video (AVI)	Polaris=4:08	Artemis=5:20	Elf=5:38

Multimedia-cycle, audio (MP3) Polaris=13:49	Artemis=21:34	Elf=18:07

<End of summary>

You can see that for MP3 the Polaris is way worse than the Artemis (I'm assuming the numbers are <hours>:<minutes> of play time). With what I commented on in my first paragraph these results really suprise me.

Does anyone know the conditions/details of the video and audio multimedia-cycle tests above? I'm wondering if somehow the conditions for the Polaris test were less favourable than those for the Artemis. Maybe the MP3 decoder software was different between the Artemis and the Polaris and the latter was dramatically less efficient although I'm probably clutching at straws here. Any other thoughts, comments or real life results from owners?

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] Rudegar:
funny how the 2 wm6 devices have lower batt time then the wm5 device

would be intresting if a test with an aramis with wm6 was don
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
That's a really interesting point. I was considering upgrading my device to WM6 using one of the cooked ROMs from this site, or the official O2 Orbit one, but I decided not to after seeing quite a few posts here by people who had done it and reported that the battery life on their devices went down a lot after upgrading to WM6 so I do wonder if that is the issue.

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] baimo:
I already ordered a second battery. I always do regardless of the device. One less thing to worry about
[Touch Cruise General] ---Alex---:
I am impressed with the battery capacity of the Polaris compared to my MIO A201. Running Tomtom without charging on the MIO A201 about 2 hours, with the Polaris 4 hours.
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
What screen brightness is that set at? I'm assuming that the MP3 test results I quoted are with the screen blanked because if not then almost 24 hours on an Artemis with the screen on is pretty amazing.

If the tests do involve the screen being on (and surely they must with the video tests?) then I do wonder if the brightness settings were the same between the Artemis and Polaris tests.

If you look at some pictures further up in the review that I linked to in the first post of this thread then you can pretty clearly see that, I assume with both set to maximum brightness, the Polaris screen is noticeably brighter than the Artemis, so it isn't really fair on the Polaris to run any <screen on maximum> tests with both having the backlight set to full; it would be much fairer to adjust the Polaris backlight to give as close to possible the same brightness as the Artemis screen on full. Just maybe this accounts for some of the difference.

Thanks a lot Alex for the info on the TomTom results but I'd love to hear some real-life results of people playing music in a loop with the screen blanked and also discharge rates with the device just left at idle but with the auto-off and backlight-off disabled so that the screen stays alive. How much does the battery drain after 2 hours of sitting idle like this?

The reason I ask my questions is because the things that burn the most "activity hours" on my device are playing music with the screen blanked (hence my first request) and reading ebooks, for which my second requested test is probably a fairly reasonable approximation.

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] JwY:
They're comparing it to two devices with OMAP processors. Power savings is one of the reasons the OMAP was used before. It's either power or battery, rarely both unless the device is large. You could probably underclock to increase battery life.
[Touch Cruise General] victoradjei:
You hit the nail right on the head. I have not bothereed to check the source so I do not know the purpsoe of the test. In any case if you want 3 days of music you would be better of with an iP.... If you want processing power then you look for a device that will not make you fall asleep just waiting for a page to refresh :eek:
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
I was expecting someone to say this and I'm afraid that my hunch, which I am willing to admit could be wrong, makes me disagree with this. There is some reasoning to justify my hunch and it goes as follows.

Make the following assumptions (all numbers chosen for ease of arithmetic rather than accuracy since I am just trying to demonstrate a principle rather than derive results):

1) Yes, the CPU in the Polaris is more powerful than the one in the Artemis and lets assume that the Polaris CPU (PCPU for short) is exactly twice as powerful as the Artemis CPU (ACPU for short). By twice as powerful I mean that in any given second the PCPU will process twice as many instructions as the ACPU.

2) I am assuming that both CPUs have some sort of speed stepping technology such that, when they are not under load, the power consumption drops significantly to a fairly trivial value and I will assume that for both CPUs the idle power consumption is equivalent.

3) Assume that at full load the PCPU has twice the power consumption of the ACPU.

4) Assume that it takes a 100,000,000 instructions to decode and play 1 second of music (i.e. 100MIPS = 100 million instructions per second) and that the ACPU can only just manage this so when playing music the ACPU is at 100% load for 100% of the time.

With the above assumptions my point now is that a more powerful CPU won't create a serious decline in battery life when playing music because the 100 million instructions required to be executed for 1 second of music is constant so a 100MIPS processor will need to run flat out constantly to play music whereas a 200MIPS processor will only need to be at 100% load for 0.5 seconds in any given second and for the rest of the time it can be speed stepped right down. With the idealised assumptions above there would actually be no impact whatsoever on power consumption for any arbitrary processor power (for processors that have at least sufficient power to keep up with the music stream).

A further piece of real life evidence is, if it is solely or even predominantly down to the processor, then why is the Elf managing 18:07 on the MP3 test compared to the Artemis 13:49 (and that I believe this is with a smaller battery than the Artemis, 1100mAh vs 1250mAh; info taken from the specs on the HTC web site)?

Maybe assumption (2) is wrong which does hurt my argument somewhat, or maybe there are software differences, in the MP3 player and/or in WM6 itself, that stops the PCPU dropping its power consumption down as much when it's not actively decoding, but that Elf vs Artemis test result difference still makes me wonder what else is going on.

Honestly, I'm really hoping this is just due to a badly run test on the Polaris (not same conditions as Artemis test) and that the result is an Anomaly.

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] sonesh:
I've had the xda Stellar (tytn II), which is very very similar to the polaris, for the last week, and the battery is, I'm sorry to say, the worse I've ever come across.

For the first few days, I was using it heavily and managed 1.5 days. Figured this would increase as I used it less. Took it off charge 5 hours ago, made a 20 minute phone call, sent 3 text messages, and used the word processor for 30 minutes. 75% battery left.

I'm sending it back and waiting for the Orbit 2 to be released. Fingers crossed the keyboard has some strange battery draining feature.
[Touch Cruise General] maati:
The Stellar only has an 1100mAh battery while the Polaris has 1350mAh. Sounds little but makkes a differece of 200 (yes, 200!) hours of StandBy time.

This means the Stellar specs say 250h whereas the Polais spec sheet says 450h.
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
Yeah. That's very bad. I wonder if there's something wrong with your unit. According to the spec on the HTC web site you should be getting talk time of "Up to 264 minutes for UMTS - Up to 420 minutes for GSM". As far as I'm aware holding a call is by far the most battery-draining thing you can do on a device so if we count your 30 minutes of word processing as another 30 minutes of talk time we're probably grossly over-estimating but, on that assumption (and adding 5 minutes for the texts) that's only an equivalent of 55 minutes of talk time. Were you on 3G or GSM for all this? I suppose if it was 3G then maybe you could have expected the battery to be down to 79% but if it was GSM then the battery really shouldn't have been much below 87%.

Admittedly I think these talk time figures quoted by manufacturers are in very ideal conditions (i.e. very high signal strength from the mast) so what sort of reception area you were in when you made the call is an issue but I think that is probably counteracted by the fact that I probably vastly overestimated the power drain when word processing.

An interesting (free) utility is abcPowerMeter (http://www.acbpocketsoft.com/). It would be very interesting to compare the current consumption on the Artemis, the Polaris and the Tyan II.

If anyone is up for this then I suggest the state to test would be with the system sitting on the today screen, disable the auto-off but do allow the backlight to go off or manually disable it so that differing screen brightness isn't a factor. Also put the phone into flight mode so that all radios are off (to factor out any effects of different signal strengths) and then start abcPowerMeter and let it run for about 30 minutes during which time it should, in theory, settle to a pretty straight line showing the current drawn from the battery in this state.

I would most certainly do an Artemis (or rather O2 XDA Orbit) test but unfortunately the reason for my intense interest in all things Polaris is that my Orbit died on new year's eve (no, I didn't drop it or sit on it at a party!) so my device is totally dead.

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
Could the Today plugins be making a difference? I'm thinking particularly the weather plugin. I've seen other discussions where people report battery life problems on various devices and one often-mentioned that people suggest to check is what Today plugins are running.

With the new devices now 3G, and 3G using a lot more power than 2/2.5G when active, I'm wondering if the weather plugin is causing 3G to be active and hurting power. How often does the weather plugin connect and can it be disabled? Not wanting to take the thread off topic but one thing I'd like to do if/when I get a Polaris is to disable the weather plugin on the Today screen, is this possible?

For my use, since I am concerned about battery life, I intend to keep my device in GSM mode and only switch to 3G when I want to connect to the internet and, when finished, I will immediately disable 3G again. I certainly don't want any plugins regularly polling the internet and turning stuff on without my permission.

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] Muyz:
acbPowerMeter

I installed acbPowerMeter this afternoon, after noticing that my battery was draining extremely fast (~ 4 to 5 hours). The tool showed that the TC was using approx 320mA on average :eek:

I've been running the tool for some hours now, and after two hours the power consumption slowly lowered. I've been switching the screen off and on and have had the GSM radio on all the time. The avg value returned to ~20mA.

I'll keep an eye on power consumption, because now I don't trust the device anymore. I don't know what caused the huge change in power consumption in the first place.
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
Thanks for those test results Muyz. It's great to have some real data, but I'm sorry to hear that you're having battery problems too.

Regarding your results, did you start abcPowerMeter (APM for short) while your device was still plugged into the USB port? I noticed that when I had APM running when my device was charging then I got a very high mA reading (about 250mA on my 1200mAh O2 XDA Orbit) so I think the fact that there is charge current coming in confuses APM somewhat and, for the average, it could be that after you unplug it will take a while for the minutes or hours of false high readings to creep out of the statistics. I always made very sure that my device was fully unplugged before starting an APM session.

Regarding the 20mAh reading, that actually sounds very good to me. Unfortunately I'm recalling all this from memory because, as I said in an earlier post, my device is now totally dead, but I seem to remember about 29mA as as low as I saw. With the screen on the figure of 79mA sticks in my mind. As with you, these figures were all with GSM on. I had Bluetooth and WiFi disabled.

One thing that really suprised me with my tests was that, when I had a good GSM signal, I couldn't detect any difference in current drain between having GSM switched on or off (just registered to the network of course, not actually with a call active). The additional current drawn from having GSM on didn't even seem to be 1mA. The story is different in a no-signal area where the GSM keeps searching for a signal, that drained the battery really quickly.

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] energy59:
3G CONNECTION need more battery consumation(if you dont need disable), configure for normale use GSM, and the duration is guarantee...
[Touch Cruise General] Muyz:
New battery monitor tool

I've discovered a serious bug in the acbPowerMeter tool. The implementation of the tool does not use the proper types :(

This is why I've done a little programming myself last evening. The attachment to this tool contains a preliminary version of my own battery monitoring tool. It provides the correct battery readings for remaining power and current power consumption. One can adjust the polling frequency. I will complete the tool somewhere this or next week and put it on my website for download (freeware).
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
Hi Muyz,

Not wanting to jinx this, but I'm cautiously optimistic that I just un-bricked my O2 XDA Orbit (Artemis) so, as long as it doesn't go bad on me again I might now be in a position to contribute Artemis (or re-branded Artemis) data for comparison.

In preperation for the tests I'm really interested in what are the problems you found with abcPowerMeter. You say above that it "does not use the proper types". What do you mean by this? As a (fairly old) computer scientist this immediately makes me think of types as in a typed computer language (e.g. it's declaring something as int instead of long or short instead of bool). Is this what you mean? Please excuse my ignorance, I know theory but have never been anywhere near any Windows, let alone Windows Mobile, programming environments; if you do mean language types then how did you detect this without the source code (or did you find that somehow or disassemble)?

If you don't mean variable typing then what do you mean?

In any event, many thanks for the work Muyz.

I un-bricked my device by re-flashing (twice) the official O2 WM6 ROM so when (assuming my device stays stable) I start running current consumption tests then I think it's probably quite good that I upgraded my device to WM6 because that removes one variable (is the current drain a WM5 -> WM6 issue?) so we can at least compare Artemis to Polaris on a fairly like-for-like basis regarding the OS version.

I'm really glad I started this thread, I think there's been some really interesting and useful discussion here and I certainly wasn't expecting to have people jumping in and posting fixed versions of the current-monitoring software, that was a really nice surprise (but I'm still really looking forward to hearing exactly what the issue was).

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] Registerme:
Battery life in cooked ROMs - weather plugin

Hi guys,

in some cooked ROMs there seems to be a bug in the radio rom or simply in general. I've read several posts where people had the gsm units in their Artemis on full power most of the time causing the device to lose power very fast. This happened only with cooked ROMs, not with official versions. They noticed that when they had their phone close to speakers which caused the buzzing noise that you usually get when there is an incoming call or short message.

The other thing that consumes power is the weather plugin, but only when you have the auto-update activated! I disabled it and never had problems.

I think I'll buy this device anyways, haven't read any serious reasons not to buy it.
[Touch Cruise General] Muyz:
Thanks for your response, and I hope your device works properly now.

About the type issue: acdPowerMeter (obviously) uses the Windows API to retrieve battery information. It receives the information through a structure that contains signed integers. It seems as if acbPowerSoft managed to introduce a typing error by using unsigned integers instead of signed integers. The effect is that for negative values (e.g. when current is drawn from the battery), acbPowerMeter shows extremely large values. I discovered what is the most likely reason for this mistake: Microsoft shows an example on their website on how to retrieve battery status information. Their example shows the error clearly: the C# class use unsigned integers, whereas the native structure contains signed integers as you can see here. So I guess acbPocketSoft copied some code without checking the result ;)

I do not have a clue on what caused the extreme battery drain I encountered a few days ago. I have not seen it since. Soon, my tool will include a warning mechanism. I first added a few other small things, such as battery temperature, as you can see in the new attachment :)

(Yes, I know, it contains a small glitch on exiting the application, but that will be fixed asap)
[Touch Cruise General] pastrana:
Hi,

nobody uses push email with an exchange server? How las battery such under this condition and a hard use ot telephone function?

thx
[Touch Cruise General] Rudegar:
maybe thats why htc havent released drivers for more fancy graphic and video play back as taking advantage of those features would use more power ....
[Touch Cruise General] Muyz:
PowerGuard

I just finished v1.0 of my battery monitoring tool. It is available for download from the PowerGuard website. On the website, I posted some screens to show what the current capabilities of the tool are.
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
Muyz,

Wow. This looks great. Unfortunately for me your good wishes didn't do the trick, my P3300 died about 12 hours after I re-flashed it so I still have no working smart phone until the Polaris is in-stock in the UK. I think there must be a faulty block in the flash on my device that causes the OS to keep corrupting. I will try re-flashing it again just to see if it will stay alive long enough for me to install your software and do a few tests for comparison data.

I have one suggestion for v1.1. It would be good to have the option for the program to write out the data for the current session to a log file so that, if you've been running a power analysis for a few hours and then need to reset the device for some reason (because of a lock-up), you don't lose all the data. There would then also need to be a load capability to reload a session from a saved log file. By the way, I ask for this from bitter experience, I lost quite a few sessions from needing to reset my old device (although in retrospect that was obviously an indication that the hardware was on its way out).

Oh, one other point. Your screenshot of the current graph looks to have wierd (and worrying) data in that it either shows modest charging current (I assume that a negative value for current means the battery is being charged) and at the other times the power drain is stuck at 300mAh. Am I safe in assuming that this is simulated data and not real Polaris data?

- Julian
[Touch Cruise General] Muyz:
Hi Julian, I am sorry to hear that your P3300 died. I hope the Polaris will be in stock soon, since I think it really is a great smartphone (but, like other users, I do hope the video performance issue will be fixed soon).

Okay, thanks for the suggestion. Logging to and loading from file is easy to implement. I'll put it on the list. :)

The Microsoft API uses a negative value to indicate battery drain. So what you are seeing is not at all worrying: the Polaris charges at roughly 300mAh. Actually, it is a little bit more, since the Polaris was switched on while I took the screenshot. The battery drain of 100mA that you see still is quite large. It is not typical, though.

I will put some information about the sign-issue on the website. If it appears to be confusing for the majority of users, I can always decide to swap signs..

Thank you for your feedback!
[Touch Cruise General] JulianL:
I've been playing with my new Touch Cruise for most of today. Thanks to Muyz's PowerGuard I can post some real data. Here are some test cases and current draw. All tests have WiFi and Bluetooth off. All phone is GSM with 3G disabled.

1) This one is not a controlled test but I did get a call from a friend while PowerGuard was running and a GSM call in a 2-bar signal strength area was taking 285 mA. With a 1350 mAh battery and assuming stopping using the device at 10% remaining ( = 1215mAh useable) that gives 4.26 hours of talk time. The manual claims up to 7 hours but I bet that is in a perfect 4-bar signal area and maybe running the battery all the way down to 0% so my real-life data doesn't seem to me reasonably in accordance with the spec.

2) Sitting on my desk, doing nothing, with the GSM on and reception showing 2 bars and the backlight off. Current draw = 34 mA.

3) As above with GSM off. Current draw = 34 mA.

4) Sitting on my desk, doing nothing, with the GSM on and reception showing 2 bars and the backlight on at setting 3 of 10. Current draw = 46-47 mA.

5) As above with GSM off. Current draw = 47 mA.

I see that I get the same suprising (to me) result on the Touch Cruise as I got on my old O2 XDA Orbit; there seems to be no measurable additional battery drain with the GSM turned off vs when it's turned on, and this is even in a fairly weak 2-bar zone.

At this time I'm not going to post any tests playing music because all my files are encoded with AAC+ and I believe these are much more CPU-intensive to decode vs MP3 so the results could be misleading. Now that I have a working device I plan to do some extensive testing on relative sound quality and battery life for AAC and AAC+ using CBR and VBR (probably all at 64kbs type of file sizes) because I need to do this to determine which AAC route to take for encoding my music. While I'm doing this I will also try to do a quick comparison test of current drain against a 64kbs MP3 file but I already know from pasts tests that this sounds so bad as to be almost unlistenable so this will just be for interest. I will post results when I have a chance to do that but I seriously doubt that it will be within the next week.

I'd be very interested in other people's experiences measuring current consumption of the TC in various states and running various apps..

- Julian