Plans for working on battery life

[gummbah]

My point was not that battery life should have priority on the developers list, but rather to get an idea if it is on the developers list at all and when we can expect to be worked on. I fully agree with Llorean here that other issues need primary attention, in particular when developers think so. But as a future user of Rockbox I feel that it is important to be looked at in the future in order to make Rockbox fully functional and usable.

[elv]

just remember the ipod does less things, and displays less colours than rockbox...for instance with a backdrop with alot of colours uses up alot more battery power than a solid colour...but a solid colour still takes up more that the ipods white backdrop.....its kinda like viewing a photo and listening to music at the same time and apple says: (for the video)
30GB: Up to 14 hours of music playback; up to 3 hours of slideshows with music; up to 2 hours of video playback
60GB: Up to 20 hours of music playback; up to 4 hours of slideshows with music; up to 3 hours of video playback

so mabey to consume your battery try to have a plain backdrop....and its pretty self explanitory that games use up alot of battery power to...

Wouldn't having a plain black background color use less battery power than a plain white?

[gummbah]

Is there any update on battery life?
Has it been improved, or will it be before the November release?

Thanks.

[Llorean]

The November release is *far* from a guaranteed thing.

And we can't magically say "yes it will be improved before November" since a lot of whether it get fixed or not depends on what we learn about the chip, and you really can't schedule discoveries.

[gummbah]

Thanks for the update.

[stripwax]

Wouldn't having a plain black background color use less battery power than a plain white?

Not on an LCD, no.

[xlarge]

Wouldn't having a plain black background color use less battery power than a plain white?

Not on an LCD, no.

Rather the opposite. Since the backlight lights up all of the screen and the lcd is used to filter the light.
So if it's all black the backlight is on and all pixels are "on" blocking all light using max power.

[Yotto]

Are the screens on the 4th and 5th gen ipods actually lcd screens?  I thought they were not, but now I'm doubting myself.

[senab]

Are the screens on the 4th and 5th gen ipods actually lcd screens?  I thought they were not, but now I'm doubting myself.

Yes they are.

[fatherfork]

It's the Creative Zens that use OLED displays.

FF

[steve-lainen]

Dear Llorean

I am overall very satisfied with the work you and other developers do with the RB project and we are many who owe you a great deal , but you statement that battery life is completely non-essential is IMHO completely way-off  . As you might know the Ipod as well as other portable players are just that.... portable and thus the battery life is of great importance...... imagine you develop RB and releases version 1.0 to the public.... and in the last sentence mentions "BTW, battery life is only 15 min". That would make all RB totally useless for 99.99999% of the portable music player users.

Better use time on battery than on all the (IMHO) useless gaming plug-ins.

Battery life is of great importantance.

Just my 5 cent.

Cheers,
Peter

[Febs]

imagine you develop RB and releases version 1.0 to the public.... and in the last sentence mentions "BTW, battery life is only 15 min". That would make all RB totally useless for 99.99999% of the portable music player users.

We would never release an official Rockbox version under those conditions. 

No-one disputes that battery life is an important issue.  I think that Llorean's point is that the current battery life is sufficient to allow other development to take place.  That "other development" includes optimizations that may improve battery life.  To the extent that they do not, then it remains to track down where the problem lies.  There is not much documentation available for the iPod hardware.  Llorean made a good point in another thread where he wrote battery fixes require discoveries regarding how the hardware works, and you can't schedule discoveries.

[Yotto]

...you statement that battery life is completely non-essential is IMHO completely way-off...

Yes, it is completely way off, mostly because he didn't say that.  He said it was completely non-essential to DEVELOPMENT.

Saying you don't agree with him is like saying you don't agree with the statement that, "food is completely non-essential to computers," because without food you would die.

[L]

Most people just don't bother reading through the entire thread before posting replies. Either that or they lack the capability to understand.

[steve-lainen]

Yotto, OK, you are right, of course battery life is non-essential to development. But Lloreans statement just made me think he did not value battery life very much and that he did not think it was necessary to focus on it at all until sometime in the future. Battery life optimisation should be thought of as an integrated part of the RB development and not a "user anomality" which can be taken care when time allows it...... and of course I am aware that other optimisations not directly involved in battery optimisation will change battery life.

Peter

"L" to whom are adressing your reply??