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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
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
Rudegar said:
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
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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
I already ordered a second battery. I always do regardless of the device. One less thing to worry about
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.
---Alex--- said:
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.
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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
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.
JwY said:
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.
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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
JwY said:
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.
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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
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.
sonesh said:
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.
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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.
sonesh said:
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.
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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
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
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
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.
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
3G CONNECTION need more battery consumation(if you dont need disable), configure for normale use GSM, and the duration is guarantee...
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).
Muyz said:
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).
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Click to collapse
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
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.
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)
Okay, needless to say, operating systems like iOS and Android are improving plus the new processors heading to dual core. However, battery technology is way behind I think. What improvements are needed in this field to get a smartphone working for a week on one charge (not realistic but ideal)?
Fuel cells?
New alloys?
What would work to help our battery technology which is falling behind?
Battery technology is far behind but it has been for over 100 years. For electric cars Toyota claims to have a new battery with 2-3x the power density of current batteries. Although for general purpose I believe Lithium Phosphate is still the current state of the art technology.
Fuel Cells are neat technology but not yet that practical just like 10year miniature nuclear cells.
The biggest problems in my opinion are
1. phone size (everything is getting so thin or small in general) leaving less room for a battery
2. screen size (huge touchscreen = big power draw), and other things too that impact battery life.
3. things that run in the background keeping the phone cpu in something other than its lowest power state
4. screen brightness. Seems trivial but can make a big difference and I think all phones should have ambient light sensors are change automatically.
5. internet connectivity. It goes along with #3 in that it wakes the cpu, but also the current wireless chipsets don't seem all that energy efficient. Using any connectivity cellular, wifi, or bluetooth really eats the battery. Many report turning off wifi, bluetooth, and using 2g when possible significantly improve battery life.
Personally I have the biggest battery I could get for my phone and my laptop too. My 17" laptop runs 4.5 hrs at lowest brightness and 3 hrs at the brightest setting. Most phones aren't much different.
Sorry long rant...... does that break down your question correctly?
landoftheeskimos said:
Battery technology is far behind but it has been for over 100 years. For electric cars Toyota claims to have a new battery with 2-3x the power density of current batteries. Although for general purpose I believe Lithium Phosphate is still the current state of the art technology.
Fuel Cells are neat technology but not yet that practical just like 10year miniature nuclear cells.
The biggest problems in my opinion are
1. phone size (everything is getting so thin or small in general) leaving less room for a battery
2. screen size (huge touchscreen = big power draw), and other things too that impact battery life.
3. things that run in the background keeping the phone cpu in something other than its lowest power state
4. screen brightness. Seems trivial but can make a big difference and I think all phones should have ambient light sensors are change automatically.
5. internet connectivity. It goes along with #3 in that it wakes the cpu, but also the current wireless chipsets don't seem all that energy efficient. Using any connectivity cellular, wifi, or bluetooth really eats the battery. Many report turning off wifi, bluetooth, and using 2g when possible significantly improve battery life.
Personally I have the biggest battery I could get for my phone and my laptop too. My 17" laptop runs 4.5 hrs at lowest brightness and 3 hrs at the brightest setting. Most phones aren't much different.
Sorry long rant...... does that break down your question correctly?
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It sure does for me thanks
nova display and amoled plus is good for battery
li-po is more efficient than li-ion
dual core is more efficient about 40% than single core (in ginger bread)
Hello. I'm new with the account here, but been reading this forum for years.
I'm creating this thread because my new Nexus 5 (which I have for 20 days now) is overheating more than a normal mobile device should.
When i bought it, it had 4.4.4 Kit kat android, and I had that one for about 5 days, and in that time, I didn't notice any overheating, or maybe didn't pay attention, can't remember really.
But after installing official Lollipop 5.0.1, the device is heating pretty good even when browsing internet for 5 minutes, at about 30-40% brightness.
**** Please tell me if some of your devices are acting the same, and is it worth a try to install back an older android to try if it will stop overheating, or my device may be faulty and should I take it back for another one (or maybe switch to LG G2) ?
Because I'm still unable to post image links, i will write it down:
- Ambient temperature: 23 degrees Celsius
- The temperature sensor is taped on the back side, at the side of camera, this is where it overheats most. (even if not using camera)
- Phone temp after staying on standby with screen off: 28 C (it's not warm but it is warmer than desk which it is sitting on)
- After staying idle on home screen with screen on for 10 minutes (50% brightness): 30.5 C
- After chatting on Messenger for 10 minutes: 34.3 C (feels warm)
- After recording video for 4 minutes: 41 Celsius!!! (almost uncomfortably hot in the whole upper half of the phone, both the back side and the screen)
- After 15 minutes letting it cool down, with screen off of course, it is 38 C (still hot to touch), and it stays like that untill I reboot the phone, then it cools down.
The test took about 50 minutes, and after that, battery was drained for about 25%.
-While charging, the phone does not overheat, just gets a little warm which is OK. (haven't tried wireless charging)
P.S. I don't play games on the phone...
Please act quick in case I should return the phone...
the only time my phone gets hot is when im intensively doing a lot of things..
for example.. im playing ingress, have tether ON, and my two sons are using their tablets connected to my phone playing ingress too..
but if i turn off the game and turn off tether, it cools down..
to me it sounds u have something intesively using your CPU and perhaps GPS and other radios.
hold power button.. when PWR OFF shows, long press it and reboot into SAFE MODE...
use the phone for a bit and see if it gets warm... this should tell you if its apps installed.
I only used wifi, no tethering, no GPS, 3G, NFC or any other radios, cell signal is good so phone is not searching for it.
- In safe mode, it still gets warm when using camera. When browsing internet and watching images in google search, also but just mild warm..
- But after sitting and thinking, I've found a problem! After recording with camera and leaving it to cool down, it didn't cool down because it had to make an effort to upload that 5 min video on Google drive via Auto backup!
After turning the Auto-backup off, it is now much cooler!
I will post tomorrow with the results, if something changes...
Anyway, thank you!
First of all, "warm" doesn't mean anything.
Battery temperature does not mean much either, as the CPU is what generates the most heat.
There is a battery temperature throttle that reduces the CPU frequency, but it is almost entirely pointless as the CPU will always reach it's own throttle temperatures MUCH, MUCH earlier than the battery will. The CPU starts throttling at 65C CPU temp (NOT battery temp), and shuts itself down at about 105C CPU temp. Unless your battery somehow reaches a batterytemp of 70C+ (nearly impossible because the CPU will always hit it's throttle first), then I would never even take it into any sort of consideration unless you have a physical battery defect.
Using the camera generates heat since it's CPU and power intensive.
Using the phone in general will generate heat.
Keep in mind that mobile devices are passively cooled, not actively cooled with a fan/liquid.
Not sure what you're so worried about.
Lower your brightness
Lethargy, thank you for a short physics lesson. I'm already into physics and cooling systems so all is clear. I was just worried a bit because all of my previous phones weren't getting this warm (hot), but also never had a multi-core processor in phone eather, maybe that's the reason why I never experienced this before.
Battery temp (measured with app) gets up to 40-42 degrees Celsius, while the phone case gets up to 41 when recording video. Of course that temp won't damage the device, I'm not worried about the processor, but that temp is degrading battery life, in long term.
And about the brightness, phone is not meant to be used at lowest brightness all the time, so that shouldn't be an excuse for high temps. Just sayin'...
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app
AlexSRB said:
Lethargy, thank you for a short physics lesson. I'm already into physics and cooling systems so all is clear. I was just worried a bit because all of my previous phones weren't getting this warm (hot), but also never had a multi-core processor in phone eather, maybe that's the reason why I never experienced this before.
Battery temp (measured with app) gets up to 40-42 degrees Celsius, while the phone case gets up to 41 when recording video. Of course that temp won't damage the device, I'm not worried about the processor, but that temp is degrading battery life, in long term.
And about the brightness, phone is not meant to be used at lowest brightness all the time, so that shouldn't be an excuse for high temps. Just sayin'...
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app
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The only thing that sounded odd was how it wasn't cooling down until you rebooted, but it sounds like you figured that out with the automatic upload setting.
41-42c battery temp can be normal after prolonged usage, though personally I usually see that after a short gaming session. My brightness is around 40% and high brightness will cause extra heat.
Otherwise the phone is very thin so you can feel the stacked SoC and RAM heat up through the skin fairly easily, right around the camera area as you mentioned.
I think each device and CPU is slightly different and can vary by a few degrees under load as well.
AlexSRB said:
Lethargy, thank you for a short physics lesson. I'm already into physics and cooling systems so all is clear. I was just worried a bit because all of my previous phones weren't getting this warm (hot), but also never had a multi-core processor in phone eather, maybe that's the reason why I never experienced this before.
Battery temp (measured with app) gets up to 40-42 degrees Celsius, while the phone case gets up to 41 when recording video. Of course that temp won't damage the device, I'm not worried about the processor, but that temp is degrading battery life, in long term.
And about the brightness, phone is not meant to be used at lowest brightness all the time, so that shouldn't be an excuse for high temps. Just sayin'...
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app
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Click to collapse
Your temperatures are fine and you shouldn't worry about it. It's average for a Nexus 5, and there are throttles/shutdown temps anyways, for both the battery and CPU. I've had mine for a year and there hasn't been any sort of issue, normal usage should be negligible to the condition of the battery.
Ok, everything seems to be ok then. Now I can go to sleep without worrying Thanks guys!
Sent from my Nexus 5 using XDA Free mobile app
I need a tablet or phabet (screen <6") to geolocalize many points on the road and bring data back to my pc?
I need a precision less than 10 meters and a very fast connection time, so I would look for a device with GPS + GLONASS.
I would also need good autonomy at a price not too high (possibly less than 200 €).
Can anyone give me some suggestions?
EDIT: I did manage to find a couple of good sources that I've given below.
I've been using Galaxy s7 exynos for a long time now. I recently had the battery replaced because it had gone to about 50% of its original battery and that got me wondering, does the physical phone itself wear out? Do the chips degrade over time, does the RAM start going bad, that kind of thing. I've rooted and have used factory reset and custom ROMs along the way, so what I'm looking for is information completely apart from the fact that software concerns can slow a phone down and make most owners think their phone is getting old and wearing out. Also I realize that as time goes on and hardware gets better that sometimes apps will outstrip a phone's original abilities but I'm not talking about that either. I've done some googling and mostly what I find is articles talking about "my phone is old now (because better phones with better hardware are now available)" and "if your phone slows down just do a factory reset".
After more googling, I found this information on Quora at https://www.quora.com/Do-smartphone-chips-wear-out-over-time, by Valerie Cietto. This may help someone else with the same question :
Yes, but very slowly. Flash memory has a limited number of writes, usually in the order of 10^5 to 10^9. After that number of changes it become as read only, but it doesn't fail all at once, just some byte at once. Then that sector is marked as bad, backed up and ignored, so the memory still works, with a small reduction in capacity.
Newest flash memory file systems even do wear leveling, so writes are scattered over the whole memory, so that the memory lasts more.
Flash memory also have a definite lifespan due to electromagnetic noise and other kind of radiations. While this is a serious issue on space or other planets, memories on Earth are expected to last at least 20years.
Speakers and microphones wear down due to dust, humidity and loss of magnetic charge. Expect to need to change them after 20-50 years.
Camera sensors degrade due to light radiation. Hardware corrections automatically hide dead pixels. Unless you love to make timelapses of sun every day, this should not concern you. And even if you do you have noticeable effects only if you get raw images.
LCD has a definite lifespan before showing dead pixels. LCD TVs are rated for 4-10 years before some key component, but common faults for LCD TVs are not the screen or the pixels, but motherboard or power supply. Smartphone LCD should last much more, in part because they don't need electrolytic capacitors, and are lower powered. Some reviewer has pointed out that pixels lower brightness year after year, with noticeable effects on always on devices. The too dim to read thresold may be crossed after 10 years of normal use.
Also CPU degrades over time, but not with a noticeable effect unless you benchmark them. The main cause is the clock, that drifts over time.
Processors have negligible wear due to use, and lower the power is, lesser the stress on the circuit is.
Underclocking may extend the lifespan of the CPU, but it's more useful to save battery, rather than making the phone last more.
Overclocking, high temperature or voltage spikes can damage CPU. Once the processor is burnt, is gone, and must be replaced. Unfortunately just changing the CPU block is not feasible without damaging other parts.
CPU and RAM are on the same chip or soldered together in most smartphones, so if CPU burns you need to replace the whole motherboard.
RAM degrades like flash memory. When a bad sector of RAM is found it is marked as bad from the memory processor and ignored. On small RAM system a bad RAM read can cause an application to crash unexpectedly.
WiFi, GSM, GPS, Bluetooth radios are rated for 10 years of operation, but can last probably more. The failing cause is the driver IC, which includes a microprocessor and flash memory. Newest phones are highly integrated, so that IC could be bundled inside together with CPU, RAM and Flash.
Motherboard solder joints may break due to shocks or bending.
Battery of course is the component which degrades faster.
As an holistic analysis, most phones go out of service when they can warrant other 5-10 years of use. And even "broken" phones will live again with some inexpensive replacement. All components except motherboard and connectors fail gracefully, as they slowly degrade in performance, instead of stopping to work at all suddenly, so the phone ages well if it doesn't receive shocks, immersions,too much heat, massive radiation or fine dust.
Don't worry to use the phone in daily use, other technologies have more weak points.
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And this article seems pretty well written to explain the software / OS reasons why a phone seems to perform less well over time:
https://lifehacker.com/why-your-smartphone-seems-to-slow-down-as-it-ages-1798440451