4 ms·

This is cool, but a 5 hour battery life is kind of a dealbreaker for a device I would be very mobile with. The 11 inch macbook air used to get over 11 hours, a

This is cool, but a 5 hour battery life is kind of a dealbreaker for a device I would be very mobile with. The 11 inch macbook air used to get over 11 hours, and netbooks used to get like at least 4 hours.

kragen 4y ago
Can you put a bigger battery into it?
- vidarh 4y ago
  Even if you can't, it has 8000mAh total battery capacity there are plenty of 30,000mAh+ battery packs on Amazon. If you can really get 5 hours out of 8000mAh, relying on a battery pack for the instances where you expect there's a chance of spending 5 hours using it somewhere without a charger seems reasonable...
  - kragen 4y ago
    Most of those "30,000 mAh" battery packs on Amazon are actually 8000 mAh, as you can compute by dividing their volume by a trustworthy source of information about lithium-ion battery energy density like https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Sanyo%20NCR20700B%204000mAh%20%28Red%29%20UK.html https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Sanyo%20NCR20700B.... That aside, in a lot of the situations where I'd like to use a portable computer, it would be very inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous, to have it cabled to an external battery pack.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      The largest I have is currently is ~20,000 or so, and the weight is in well in line (~450g) and capacity seems to match well with what it's meant to be. One of the 30,000 mAh ones that shows up for me on Amazon even has a picture of it on scales with a big "Note: Bulky and a bit heavy" and showing a weight of 659g for the pack compared to 61.2g for the 4000mAh cells shown on the site you link. I don't doubt there are fakes out there, but so far I've not run into any. But that's besides the point, really which is that you if it works for you - and it sounds like it doesn't for you (but it does for me) - then battery backs solves the capacity issue. Obviously if you can't or won't use battery packs then it won't. For me battery packs is very much preferable to having the device itself be bigger and heavier, because it means I can adjust the bulk I carry with me depending on where I'm going.
- criddell 4y ago
  The battery is big enough. Power consumption is what needs to be addressed.
  - kragen 4y ago
    I have some 400×240 memory-in-pixel LCDs here that are claimed to do 20 fps at 0.1 mW and some Ambiq Apollo3 subthreshold microcontrollers that are claimed to do 7 ARM MIPS (≈9 Dhrystone MIPS) at 0.2 mW, with the ability to run up to 96 MHz at proportionally higher power consumption. Two such displays would have more pixels than the original Macintosh, and one such microcontroller would have three times its RAM and ten times its CPU power, using 0.4 mW in total. Such a mobile workstation would take 8½ years to chew through 8000 mAh at 3.7 volts, though actually the battery's self-discharge would run it down sooner. I'm working on a machine built around that hardware, called the Zorzpad, in a form factor similar to the Pocket Reform. My plan for the Zorzpad, though, is to have no battery at all, just solar panels. I think I can get a milliwatt from amorphous solar panels even under indoor lighting, and not having a battery should make the machine last a lot longer: no charging port to break, no battery wear, and no risk of battery fires or leakage. But the laptop I'm typing this on is about 40'000 Dhrystone MIPS, so it's about 4000 times faster than the 0.4-mW configuration and 350 times faster than the maximum-speed configuration. I suspect the Pocket Reform is closer to my laptop in speed. The laptop has 24-bit color and 2 megapixels; the Zorzpad will have 0.1 megapixels. I think the Pocket Reform has 16-bit color and 1 megapixel. You will never run Firefox on the Zorzpad, and probably almost no software I run on my laptop will run on the Zorzpad. Most of it will run on the Pocket Reform, but some of it might be slow.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      This sounds interesting. Is it a one-off custom build, or are you planning to sell them?
      - kragen 4y ago
        A one-off custom build, but I'm planning to do the physical part with almost full automation, and of course I'll make all my files available under open-source licenses, so it'll be as easy as I can make it for other people to print their own. You might need Google Translate if you don't speak Spanish, though.

kragen 4y ago

Can you put a bigger battery into it?

vidarh 4y ago
Even if you can't, it has 8000mAh total battery capacity there are plenty of 30,000mAh+ battery packs on Amazon. If you can really get 5 hours out of 8000mAh, relying on a battery pack for the instances where you expect there's a chance of spending 5 hours using it somewhere without a charger seems reasonable...
- kragen 4y ago
  Most of those "30,000 mAh" battery packs on Amazon are actually 8000 mAh, as you can compute by dividing their volume by a trustworthy source of information about lithium-ion battery energy density like https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Sanyo%20NCR20700B%204000mAh%20%28Red%29%20UK.html https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/Sanyo%20NCR20700B.... That aside, in a lot of the situations where I'd like to use a portable computer, it would be very inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous, to have it cabled to an external battery pack.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    The largest I have is currently is ~20,000 or so, and the weight is in well in line (~450g) and capacity seems to match well with what it's meant to be. One of the 30,000 mAh ones that shows up for me on Amazon even has a picture of it on scales with a big "Note: Bulky and a bit heavy" and showing a weight of 659g for the pack compared to 61.2g for the 4000mAh cells shown on the site you link. I don't doubt there are fakes out there, but so far I've not run into any. But that's besides the point, really which is that you if it works for you - and it sounds like it doesn't for you (but it does for me) - then battery backs solves the capacity issue. Obviously if you can't or won't use battery packs then it won't. For me battery packs is very much preferable to having the device itself be bigger and heavier, because it means I can adjust the bulk I carry with me depending on where I'm going.
criddell 4y ago
The battery is big enough. Power consumption is what needs to be addressed.
- kragen 4y ago
  I have some 400×240 memory-in-pixel LCDs here that are claimed to do 20 fps at 0.1 mW and some Ambiq Apollo3 subthreshold microcontrollers that are claimed to do 7 ARM MIPS (≈9 Dhrystone MIPS) at 0.2 mW, with the ability to run up to 96 MHz at proportionally higher power consumption. Two such displays would have more pixels than the original Macintosh, and one such microcontroller would have three times its RAM and ten times its CPU power, using 0.4 mW in total. Such a mobile workstation would take 8½ years to chew through 8000 mAh at 3.7 volts, though actually the battery's self-discharge would run it down sooner. I'm working on a machine built around that hardware, called the Zorzpad, in a form factor similar to the Pocket Reform. My plan for the Zorzpad, though, is to have no battery at all, just solar panels. I think I can get a milliwatt from amorphous solar panels even under indoor lighting, and not having a battery should make the machine last a lot longer: no charging port to break, no battery wear, and no risk of battery fires or leakage. But the laptop I'm typing this on is about 40'000 Dhrystone MIPS, so it's about 4000 times faster than the 0.4-mW configuration and 350 times faster than the maximum-speed configuration. I suspect the Pocket Reform is closer to my laptop in speed. The laptop has 24-bit color and 2 megapixels; the Zorzpad will have 0.1 megapixels. I think the Pocket Reform has 16-bit color and 1 megapixel. You will never run Firefox on the Zorzpad, and probably almost no software I run on my laptop will run on the Zorzpad. Most of it will run on the Pocket Reform, but some of it might be slow.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    This sounds interesting. Is it a one-off custom build, or are you planning to sell them?
    - kragen 4y ago
      A one-off custom build, but I'm planning to do the physical part with almost full automation, and of course I'll make all my files available under open-source licenses, so it'll be as easy as I can make it for other people to print their own. You might need Google Translate if you don't speak Spanish, though.