9 ms·

Why exactly does the Newton, a 90s PDA, have better battery life than a 2011 smartphone? There's almost certainly a trade-off, so what is it? Lack of constant c

Why exactly does the Newton, a 90s PDA, have better battery life than a 2011 smartphone? There's almost certainly a trade-off, so what is it? Lack of constant connectivity through wireless radios?

hackcasual 11y ago
Screen power is the biggest difference.
- yason 11y ago
  But the size of the software is also one. An Android image is easily hundreds of megabytes. And to go through all that code in reasonable time, you need a fast processor and fast memory. But as you crank up the frequencies you also need higher voltages to drive the gates faster and higher voltage leads to a higher leakage current...
- calgoo 11y ago
  For my LG G2 phone the Cell Data is the worst offender (unless I start watching videos or playing games). I was on vacation out of the country over Christmas and left the data roaming off. The phone went from ~ 1 day to ~4 days with wifi on syncing Mail/ twitter/ whatsapp etc. 3G/4G/LTE are really heavy on the phone battery as they use a lot of power to talk to the tower on a lot of channels at the same time.
bpicolo 11y ago
Screen takes less energy, processor takes less, etcetc. Battery tech has progressed relatively slowly compared to personal computing
jfb 11y ago
The Newton was much, much larger than a 2011 cellphone, let alone a modern one.
- mwcampbell 11y ago
  Sure, but did the Newton have much better battery life because it was larger? That is, did it use that extra space to hold a much higher-capacity battery?
- Gracana 11y ago
  The Newton doesn't have an advantage in battery capacity, despite being bigger. They used 4xAA NiMH batteries in series, so 1800mAh-ish. Two points of comparison: The iPhone 6 Plus has about the same capacity, and a Samsung Galaxy S6 has 2500mAh capacity.
  - jfb 11y ago
    True. It's probably the screen, and the lack of active radios.
marxgen 11y ago
Kinda like saying "why is that muzzle loading soldier able to maintain constant fire for 3 hours when the guy holding the machine gun runs out in 10 minutes" The two main factors from my point of view are: 1) Modern phones are more capable and allow you to drain the battery faster. (better radios, larger/brighter screens, LED vs LCD, massively more powerful processors/GPUs). An iphone 5 has a standby battery life of ~9 days[0]. 2) Cell phone manufactures target 10-24 hours of battery life when they design phones (smaller is better). I've found that my e-reader runs out of battery more often than my phone. Remembering to plug it in once every week or two is harder to do than getting in the habit of plugging in my phone every night. [0] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP655?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP655?locale=en_US
kabdib 11y ago
The Newton aggressively sleeps. It runs like hell when it needs to, then spends the rest of its time consuming as little power as possible. It kind of helps that the Newt doesn't have any kind of built-in wireless. No radio means no networky stuff that it has to periodically wake up for. The number of threads the thing runs (20-30) also spend most of their time utterly asleep. (Back in the day, a threading, message-passing OS in a small form factor was considered pretty high tech).
rdtsc 11y ago
CPU technology got faster, software more complex, battery technology didn't improve that much. Besides everyone seems to want to buy flat things... because... yeah I don't know why. "-Look! My MacBook Air is as thin as a piece of paper. -Ok cool, I guess..." Which means there isn't much space for a decent enough battery to power the 2 GHz octacore monster in there. So everyone is walking around like zombies looking for wall plugs all the time to charge their expensive $600 ultra high tech phones and tablets.

Why exactly does the Newton, a 90s PDA, have better battery life than a 2011 smartphone? There's almost certainly a trade-off, so what is it? Lack of constant connectivity through wireless radios?

hackcasual 11y ago

Screen power is the biggest difference.

yason 11y ago
But the size of the software is also one. An Android image is easily hundreds of megabytes. And to go through all that code in reasonable time, you need a fast processor and fast memory. But as you crank up the frequencies you also need higher voltages to drive the gates faster and higher voltage leads to a higher leakage current...
calgoo 11y ago
For my LG G2 phone the Cell Data is the worst offender (unless I start watching videos or playing games). I was on vacation out of the country over Christmas and left the data roaming off. The phone went from ~ 1 day to ~4 days with wifi on syncing Mail/ twitter/ whatsapp etc. 3G/4G/LTE are really heavy on the phone battery as they use a lot of power to talk to the tower on a lot of channels at the same time.

bpicolo 11y ago

Screen takes less energy, processor takes less, etcetc. Battery tech has progressed relatively slowly compared to personal computing

jfb 11y ago

The Newton was much, much larger than a 2011 cellphone, let alone a modern one.

mwcampbell 11y ago
Sure, but did the Newton have much better battery life because it was larger? That is, did it use that extra space to hold a much higher-capacity battery?
Gracana 11y ago
The Newton doesn't have an advantage in battery capacity, despite being bigger. They used 4xAA NiMH batteries in series, so 1800mAh-ish. Two points of comparison: The iPhone 6 Plus has about the same capacity, and a Samsung Galaxy S6 has 2500mAh capacity.
- jfb 11y ago
  True. It's probably the screen, and the lack of active radios.

marxgen 11y ago

Kinda like saying "why is that muzzle loading soldier able to maintain constant fire for 3 hours when the guy holding the machine gun runs out in 10 minutes" The two main factors from my point of view are: 1) Modern phones are more capable and allow you to drain the battery faster. (better radios, larger/brighter screens, LED vs LCD, massively more powerful processors/GPUs). An iphone 5 has a standby battery life of ~9 days[0]. 2) Cell phone manufactures target 10-24 hours of battery life when they design phones (smaller is better). I've found that my e-reader runs out of battery more often than my phone. Remembering to plug it in once every week or two is harder to do than getting in the habit of plugging in my phone every night. [0] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP655?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP655?locale=en_US

kabdib 11y ago

The Newton aggressively sleeps. It runs like hell when it needs to, then spends the rest of its time consuming as little power as possible. It kind of helps that the Newt doesn't have any kind of built-in wireless. No radio means no networky stuff that it has to periodically wake up for. The number of threads the thing runs (20-30) also spend most of their time utterly asleep. (Back in the day, a threading, message-passing OS in a small form factor was considered pretty high tech).

rdtsc 11y ago

CPU technology got faster, software more complex, battery technology didn't improve that much. Besides everyone seems to want to buy flat things... because... yeah I don't know why. "-Look! My MacBook Air is as thin as a piece of paper. -Ok cool, I guess..." Which means there isn't much space for a decent enough battery to power the 2 GHz octacore monster in there. So everyone is walking around like zombies looking for wall plugs all the time to charge their expensive $600 ultra high tech phones and tablets.