Battery life is going to be an issue with the Palm Pre
Posted By RichC on June 9, 2009
— “Houston, we have a problem.” —
Some heavy smartphone device users may have a problem with the Palm Pre’s battery life. My initial road test is turning up some pretty questionable results (click photo at right – used 80% of battery in 4 hours). I left the house this morning for a day on the road about 7:30AM and proceed to mount my newly synchronized Palm Pre in the old Palm Treo windshield mount. (for those following my struggle to get my old data from Treo to Pre, I ended up using Google to sync data – neither Sprint’s tools or the Palm Data Transfer Assistant worked — PC or Mac)
First item of business was to run the Sprint Navigation GPS app and plug in the first stop in Columbus Ohio. I watched in amazement as I was located a few seconds later and calculated the time of arrival while reading back the turn by turn audio directions … although the Pre has a ‘weak’ internal speaker (haven’t figured out if I can port the sound to a bluetooth device?). Next I checked Tweed (Twitter app) and looked to see that my Google calendar was syncronized from the previous night. After ‘flicking’ closed a few text messages and emails, I decided it best to focus on the road.
😯
About four phone calls and an hour into the drive from Cincinnati to Columbus, I realized that keeping the Sprint Navigation app running as a card in the background was going to quickly drain my smallish battery … remember I’m use to a much larger Palm Treo 700p battery. 
I “flicked” off the navigation “card” and proceed to take a couple more short phone calls. After stopping at my appointment south of Columbus, I decided to send a Pre photo to Twitpic using the email app. I ran Tweed again, check stocks with the Express Stocks app and glanced at the browser to see that my photo had been uploaded. All good.
An hour later I found myself stopping for lunch and realized that my battery was down to 20% (see time and battery use on photo) … so either I need to cut back on my usage in order to make it an entire day or rig up a car charging setup as I did for my Treo. (Thanks Ernest for the thought on possibly making a homemade Touchstone-like charger for my car — any additional info would be appreciated.)
_
Comments