A IIIc arrived in Red Mercury Labs on Thursday, February 25. Most reviews have mentioned in one way or the other that "color comes at the price of battery life", so the obvious question is: how good is the IIIc battery life anyway?
The first series of tests run by Red Mercury Labs have been battery life tests. The good news is that these tests have taken huge amounts of time to run.
In all tests, the auto-power-off was disabled (dot-3) and the device was left to run until it shut itself off due to extremely low power.
Test #1:
Palm IIIc with a full charge running Atom Smash in demo mode with brightness set to the brightest setting.
Result:
5.5 hours runtime before complete shutdown. Battery warnings, including "Your battery is EXTREMELY low" gave plenty of time to turn the device off, and even after complete shutdown, no data was lost.
With the brightness all the way up, the screen practically hurts your eyes. However, the high brightness is useful outdoors.
Test #2:
Palm IIIc with a full charge running Atom Smash in demo mode with brightness set to the dimmest (lowest) setting.
Result:
16 hours runtime before complete shutdown.
First Battery Low warning: 17 minutes before shutdown
First EXTREMELY Low warning: 12 minutes before shutdown
Second EXTREMELY Low warning: 9 minutes before shutdown
Third EXTREMELY Low warning: 6 minutes before shutdown
Fourth EXTREMELY Low warning: 3 minutes before shutdown
In other words, plenty of warning to turn device off at nice regular intervals.
The low brightness setting is still quite a bit more readable than the Palm III or Palm V (with or without backlighting), simply because the contrast is much better on the IIIc screen.
Test #3:
Palm IIIc with a full charge running Atom Smash in demo mode with brightness set to middle setting.
Result:
8 hours 15 minutes runtime before complete shutdown.
To set the Palm IIIc brightness to the "middle" setting, we first counted how many ticks there were on the brightness adjustment bar. There are 128 (you can use
the page up and page down keys to move the slider one click at a time). So, starting from the left edge, we moved the slider to click #64 (counting from 1).
The battery life here was quite good, and you can see an almost linear relationship between the brightness level and battery life, all other things being equal.
These performance numbers don't matter much unless we have something to compare them against, so Red Mercury Labs ran the same test with the Palm V.
Test #4:
Palm V with a full charge running Atom Smash in demo mode with backlight turned on.
Result:
The device didn't last very long - The test was started at 10PM, but the device was completely shut down by 7AM the following day.
This test will have to be re-run - we expected it to last longer than 9 hours, but it didn't, so we missed the shutoff time.
So, the best we can say for the Palm V with backlight on is "Less than 9 hours".
Test #5:
Palm V with a full charge running Atom Smash in demo mode with backlight turned off.
Result:
8 hours, 45 minutes runtime before complete shutdown.
The low battery warnings started about an hour and a half before shutdown, and kept on coming until shutdown.
This is quite different from the predictable low-battery warnings of the IIIc, but probably has more to do with the OS version than the device itself.
The funniest low battery warning on the Palm V is the one that is an advertisement for the travel recharger kit.
General conclusions:
The IIIc appears to have really good battery life. The lowest brightness setting is not a special case, in the opinion of Red Mercury. It is a very usable setting and provides better indoor visibility than any other Palm OS device with or without backlighting.
Caveats to this testing:
The above tests were run once or twice each, but the time differentials are large enough that minute-to-minute accuracy isn't all that important here. We're talking orders of magnitude differences. Still, there has been no in depth analysis to find out exactly WHY the IIIc runs so much longer than the V. The most likely explanation is that Palm tried to get battery performance to meet or exceed the Palm V at medium to high brightness settings, which resulted in awesome performance at low brightness settings.
Compare that to what some reviews are saying, for example, CNet:
"Because of the increased power consumption by the color display, the Palm IIIc's batteries won't last as long as those of the monochrome Palm devices."
CNet even made this a headline in their article, "Color Cuts Battery Life".
Where did they get this information? They don't mention any test results in their article. Palm has been cautious with what they say about Palm IIIc battery life, but maybe they have been a bit too cautious (or maybe they didn't want to draw attention to the relatively poor battery performance of the Palm V). Palm has noted that the backlight brightness is the key factor, and of course they are correct.
Many IIIc reviews have had anti-color, pro-CE, and there-goes-your-battery-life slants, but it seems to us like Palm did a good job. It's somewhat eerie to see this backlit, color thing run for 16 hours nonstop. It's just something that we've never seen before.
More Info on tests:
The application used in the test, Atom Smash Preview, can be downloaded for free, and works on all Palm OS devices (color or black & white) with OS 2.0 or greater.
The Palm V used in the test is less than two weeks old, and has had a total of 5 recharge cycles since being unwrapped. It is running factory-installed OS 3.1.
The Palm IIIc used in the test is brand new, and has had about 4 recharge cycles since being unwrapped. It is running factory-installed OS 3.5.0.
Red Mercury has no connection with Palm Computing, these tests were run to benchmark our own software performance, and had the side effect of giving some real world results on the IIIc.
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