Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Buying a smartphone - battery life

one of the things that can be a pretty important factor in choosing the right smartphone could be the battery life. Specially for someone who is not a light user or travels a lot. I had heard before that windows mobile phones do have some battery life issues, which is not a surprise considering they can be quite resource hungry even on standby. But I did wonder how symbian phones would generally fare in a test of battery consumption. I am sure other people must have tried testing too, but I came across this comparison which seems kinda popular amongst the msg board junkies. The guy had compared battery stand by time for K-Jam (Windows Mobile 5) and Nokia 9500 (Symbian OS 9), with all comms distabled for both phones (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth)


Nokia 9500

K-Jam




K-JAM (Windows Mobile 5) Nokia 9500 (Symbian OS 8)
After 12 hours 94%7 bars (out of 7)
After 24 hours78%7 bars
After 36 hours72%7 bars
After 48 hours (2 days)62%7 bars
After 72 hours (3 days)50%7 bars
After 96 hours (4 days)40%7 bars
After 120 hours (5 days)15%6 bars (phew, a change at last!)


I think the difference is really marked! But I wonder how significant is the difference in battery life in recent models. Anyone wanna share their experience with their device?

Bilal Zaheer
http://elanist.com/bilal

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I used to be a symbian fan, i still am, but lately i have been working on blackberry and have discovered it to be extremely powerful in terms of APIs and ease to develop very complex applications in no time with very small executable sizes. The rich JME API with special code signing ability to write services on blackberry is a jem.
windows mobile could have been a good os but i am not sure if it is legacy or the MS team's focus on desktop which makes them incapable to write acceptable mobile os as the windows handset is as difficult to use as a desktop. i would appreciate to have a phone first then have some smart capabilities...

Anonymous said...

I know a few guys who have been using the 9500! They are extremely happy with it... The battery life is amazing as suggested by your comparison. i-Jam, XDA all same thing! The hardware sucks the life right out of the batteries.

I use Sony Ericsson phones (Symbian based) and the battery life is amazing even with full time multimedia usage! It goes well over two days for a heavy user like myself.

Buzz Word! said...

Anonymous that sounds all cool and dandy for the software developers, but I doubt even a fraction of the users give a frac what JME API is haha. like you said, the general user would appreciate having a good phone first, smart capabilities later.

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