EEVblog #80 – Nokia E71 + Garmin Mobile XT = Embedded Hell
Dave cuts loose on the ridiculous battery life on the Nokia E71 mobile phone. And the code monkeys at Garmin and Nokia get a serve too. The main website is here: www.eevblog.com All the smart viewers hang out on the forum here www.eevblog.com
My htc desire has 750 hours standby, but it’s not cheap.
@ParadigmaticShift May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage!
This industry drives me insane with that shit. It’s bad enough when they lie about stats to sell an item, but you can’t even count on the data sheets to be accurate, and you can’t even count on the components being to spec. It’s an extra big mind fuck for those of us who are terrible at memorizing numbers.
There should be enforced truth in advertising laws, worldwide.
Next they’ll be telling you there’s a dozen eggs, when there’s only 2.
I actually wrote the chapter on performance and power consumption in the Symbian kernel internals book. It specifically says not to do half the things Nokia loves to do, and the exact thing Garmin did.
The truth is, there are millions of lines of code in that phone; it’s running a big, sophisticated OS. While power consumption was certainly a major driver in its development, like Steve Jobs said, real artists ship.
I think most people who have these sort of phones are used to having the device plugged in and charging when they’re at home. At least I am. My current phone (HTC G1) gives me about 1.5 days of heavy use or 2.5 with an extended battery. I think that’s pretty reasonable for the sort of functionality it offers. I reckon smartphones aren’t for everyone. If you just want to make phone calls and not have to charge the phone all the time, there’s no need for a smartphone.
My nokia updates never worked!
@shiftplusone80
Not when it’s advertised as having up to 480 hours standby! The fact that it now works as such proves that it was always capable of the advertised duration, so it’s just inexcusably bad firmware design.
@EEVblog Don’t get me wrong, I hate the “up to…” standard for specifications. Should just be “average” then +- certain percentage or standard deviation or something meaningful.
Ovi is just one of Nokia’s brands – for their online features. The maps are Navteq, which Nokia bought a few years back. Did Nokia finally get free navigation to the E71? Because when they announced it, they hadn’t enabled the nav function, only broken the preferences.
As for the phone itself, I could rant for days. Unfortunately I didn’t have a better option when I got it.
Garmin is not really to blame.Think about it.They need to make a generic app that supports many different platforms. If Garmin was specifically targeting the e71, then they CAN customize the power consumption, and you’d get somewhere near the performance of the Nokia maps software..
The reality is, a generic software house CAN’T do that, and still expect to turn a profit. It’s just not feasible. Add to the the proprietary-ness of the hardware and Garmin couldn’t even if they wanted to!
The HTC G1 is advertised as 5,5 days. I can actually achieve that when everything is turned off. I found that out when I was on holliday where 3g is not an option.
But since I have to charge it every day, the battery was broken (blown up like a balloon) after a year.
I love the videos were you go off on a device. Something about them makes my day
@AllenKll The E71 was one of the officially supported device. For a company the size and resources of Garmin I would certainly expect testing to have picked up this issue.
It’s not impossible to write generic apps that do not effect the device, if fact it’s not hard if you follow some rules, especially when the app is NOT running! Garmin are clearly just shit at doing this.
Get a Jail Broken iPhone or a Google Nexus one phone. Both have built in GPS software and decent battery life.
i won’t buy another Nokia as about 6 years ago they blamed me for the restore software failing to work after my phone had been serviced. I was left with punching in everything again manually so all the contacts went into a new Sony Eriksson. bye bye Nokia.
Dave, i love when you call some things a “heap of shit”. LoL.
What about the iPhone? Is that any good?
I’ve got a Nokia 5230 and I love it! Most impressive thing is that it is the only phone I’ve seen so far that achieves almost instantaneous GPS lock, all of the time, kicks the ass of its bigger brother too (5800).
And Dave, you shouldn’t take standby time seriously. Modern smartphones, especially 3G ones, don’t really get more than a couple of days of battery, especially if you use it (shortest time for battery drain for me was about an hour while using internet radio listening via Bluetooth)
@gbowne1 haha yeah, but even better is that he says it with a genuine feeling of loathing and contempt
Taking notes on how to attract blond bombshells. Say “heap a shit!” “dickheads!” “no way in hell!” “it pisses me off!” “bloody hell!” “unbelievable!” all the time, get extremely worked up & throw stuff.
Hey, i got one of these and i have a question. Do you have to format the battery?
@eydryan
Why shouldn’t I take standby time seriously?
I rarely use my phone at all, but have it on all the time, so long standby power is VERY convenient.
I now get TWO WEEKS battery life out of my E71.
Have you listened to yourself. The only Sh#% I can here is you.
Gamin XT is a battery killer. The tsautostart.exe can be seen through any task manager software and killing it doesn’t help coz it comes back soon. Garmin has changed the software after 5.10 to include an option to stop this service. You can find it here: Tools -> Settings -> System -> Launch Background Service (select disabled here) Also important to note that the above has to be enabled once then garmin has to be shutdown and reopened to select disable again.
@EEVblog hey man… can you tell me what to do on my 5230 nokia? also symbian… but instead of 400h of battery life on standby i get agbout day and a half to maximum three days… i make an average of 5-10min a day of calling and not playing cause i’m on the move all the time and really dont have the time to charge the damn thing…