Tag: battery

The smartwatch trap

The Pebble iOS Smartwatch

Ade tweeted this blog and I had a quick read.

I found this interesting and so true in the respects of what I think about smartwatches…

Once watch makers accept that we don’t want/need a tiny smartphone on our wrists, they’ll start making much more compelling watches. The only smartwatch maker that gets this right now is Pebble.

Just as phones serve a fundamentally different use case than tablets, watches serve a fundamentally different use case than phones. Watches are primarily for knowing things, not doing things.

Many of my friends who have the apple watch have given them up as the battery and consistent charging makes it a burden.

Funny enough theres also another older blog which I always think/talk about when people asking me about my pebble watch.

  1. The more you have to charge a watch, the more you have to take it off.

  2. The more you take a watch off, the less useful it is.

  3. The less useful the watch is, the less likely you are to put it back on.

Sleep tracking is a big deal for me and that means the only time my watch gets any charge is every once in a while, as I’m in the shower. Of course this isn’t every day because most of the time I’m in the shower wearing it.

HTC 1x battery usage!

HTC 1x battery on super low usage

This is another problem I’m currently having with my HTC One X. Its not unique to that phone but frankly right now, it won’t survive half a day without being charged. This is fine when your at work but out and about its a nightmare.

Luckily I have a external battery pack but today I went to Brunch with friends then headed to Volleyball training and games for 5hours. I looked at the phone and it said 14% battery left. By the time I went to Warrington Ikea and drove back the phone was at 6%!

I have already turned off Wifi, Bluetooth, NFC and GPS. Most of the time off the charge, the phone was in my volleyball bag doing nothing. I hadn’t even looked at the screen for a few hours while I played Volleyball. I also set the CPU speed down using a root app to set the CPU down a lot (Max clock Freq – 640Mhz down from 1.2Ghz) so when it is running it shouldn’t be using much CPU.

I’m at a lost what else to do, but I do wonder if Aviate is maybe causing part of the problem, time to switch to the standard launcher?

Day later with some twitter messages, I had some advice from people thinking it could be the phone trying to get a GSM signal. However it wasn’t that I don’t believe if you look at the screenshot at the top. losttourist recommended a application which tells you whats keeping your android awake and therefor killing the battery. I installed it and interestingly…

Eventbrite why you keeping my phone awake

So I deleted Eventbrite and will be monitoring what happens…

In actual fact I’ve gone back to the idea of using my phone for the things I really need and the Nexus 7 for everything. The Nexus 7 has plenty of battery and I generally carry both around.

Pacemaker hard drive problems

Pacemaker fixing

It was always going to happen…

A portable dj device which I tend to walk around with while mixing to myself. I accidentally dropped while in the middle of recording a mix. Ever since its been acting a little weird and worst still crashing mid mix.

The song which seems to trigger the hard drive to start clicking happens to be JS16’s Rosegarden 2.0 ironically.

Anyway after 6+ years of use I think its about time I made some upgrades. The great thing about the pacemaker is its pretty much a Linux PC. So a lot of the upgrades should be pretty simple. Of course the pacemaker community can help with everything…

First the hard drive, going with my wired, tired, expired. Its time to move to a solid state drive. I only tend to use about 30gigs of my 120gigs of pacemaker storage. So I’m thinking about getting a 64gigs or even 32gigs… The drive as you can imagine is needs to be a 1.8inch drive, and needs to be ZIF/PATA rather than SATA. According to the post there are two different ZIF connections 0.2 mm and 0.3 mm, although its not clear which one I actually should get.

While I’m doing that I might as well do a replacement on the battery which lasts about a hour right now. Although I discovered I could charge the pacemaker over USB while using it if the USB is pure power and not a computer. Of course I also have the AC adapter but nothing beats having lots of battery power.

This looks to be better done in a workshop?

Thanks goodness the Pacemaker isn’t made up of custom hardware bits…