Boox Note Air 3 C Pt 3: Battery Life

hey there you know one Hot Topic as it relates to the 3C is what is the battery life and you know is the battery life good or is it bad and I've seen reviews and posts on social media that have staked claims in both camps one saying that the battery life isn't particularly good and the other saying actually it's quite good and so what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show how actually those are not mutually exclusive opinions those opinions can both exist and the reason why is it's heavily dependent on how the device is being used and there are some activities which lend itself to longevity as it relates to battery life and there's other activities that tend to make battery life fairly skimpy so we'll walk through what those factors are and then I'll give my overall assessment of how I kind of feel about the battery life so let me make a couple uh observations before we get into the data first off I did about 12 hours of battery observ ations uh under various conditions uh with the device uh in order to try to kind of isolate the various factors and what have you that's a good number of observations it's by no means extensive though and there's a little bit of an approximation as it relates to the measurement of these observations so I'm using the battery indicator on the device itself which only goes in 1% increments so in generally I triy to basically wait for that counter to go down then begin my test and then conclude the test when the counter turns again that keeps that fairly accurate but some of my observations were more time based and they didn't necessarily follow that tight of a t of a um criteria so the result of that is that the observations are are generally accurate and even though I'm using you know fractions in some of these cases just keep that in mind it's really kind of a rule of thumb your uh experience may vary in addition to that there's a few factors that I didn't really attempt to isolate that could potentially have impacted battery and I think these things will generally be kind of embedded um in the selection uh of application drain so things like you know is the GPU of the device uh a battery drain there's a lot of folks that say yes and there's some folks that say no and I actually don't know the answer to that I don't have a way to tease that out so I can't tell you whether the presence of a GPU is increasing battery drain or not remember that battery drain is actually a combination of two factors it's not only how much uh energy is being used but it's also reflective of the size of the battery so all these measurements are really specific to this particular device and in order to kind of tease out the GPU element I would have to find a comparable device without a GPU to try to kind of isolate that and I just didn't bother to do that in this particular instance in a similar fashion I didn't take much account of refresh rates now I did some battery testing before with the tab Min and we did look at refresh rates in that time and while there was an impact it was not nearly the size of the impact of other factors and so generally I didn't consider them to be particularly important what I will say though is there's no question that the more the screen refreshes the more energy is being used I mean that's just the underlying technology that's involved and some refresh rates do lend themselves to uh more flashes of that screen HD is a good example of that but you can also make settings where you can actually click the number of refreshes by clicks or by pages and what have you I left all those things at default and didn't tease them out but just know that there are those things that you can use either to try to lessen the battery drain or to increase it particularly if you're refreshing at a higher frequency than the default is all right so with all that kind of geeky stuff out of the way let's go in and take a look at what my observations um revealed and what the implications of that are okay let's look at the details of my observations and see what it tells us about the battery life of the 3C so we're going to start looking at connectivity and by the way all the percentages that you're going to see is basically what the percentage drain is per hour on the device so starting with Wi-Fi if Wi-Fi is on not actively engaged but it is pinging based on the apps on the device for updates and what have you then you're talking about a 2% battery drain per hour with that on if you're talking about Bluetooth and this is Bluetooth on but not connected to a device and obviously once connected to the device it will depend on the type of device Etc but without that it's about 7/10 of a percent of drain so that represents the connectivity drain that you can experience on the device another major area for battery drain is front lighting and interestingly enough half of cold lighting drains about 1% per hour but full for cold lighting drains 6% per hour now this seems a little odd at first glance because you think that would be linear that half would be may say roughly 3 or 4% battery drain not 1% but if you actually see front Lighting on the device you can tell that half lighting is not half the brightness of full lighting it's not linear at all so these percentages do actually make sense when you look at the device the next major category um for battery drainage is on applications so we'll start with flipster so this is a magazine app it's draining about 3.2% per hour and that kind of makes sense it's mostly reading but there is some refreshes of pages as you're flipping from page to page but for the most part you're zooming in on columns and reading text so you're not refreshing the screen as much as you are with some other applications um and so that battery drain does make sense overall Google news is at 133% much higher uh than flipster for example and this makes sense too you're doing a lot of scrolling you're going into articles sometimes those articles have popup ads so there's a lot of things happening on the screen so it's very intensive and so it does make sense that it drains the battery um by a significant degree uh using the Kindle we're looking at comics and in particular we're going sell by cell in the comics and with that it's 4.3% it makes sense that that would drain more than just reading a novel because you're refreshing the screen at a much quicker rate because it's easier to read a cell and then move on to the next cell but it's not as intensive um as some other applications that's constantly refreshing the [Music] screen so speaking of novels I use Cobo and this is a bit of a rough estimate and it might actually not be quite as bad um as this but it's only 0.9% battery drain very low drain the lowest we'll see in all applications and it's simply because you refresh ing the screen um at much smaller intervals um and you've got no video or audio so it's pretty uh pretty light in terms of its intensive use of the battery this one you're going to have to take with a grain of salt so note taking I have a little over 11% of battery drain but let's be clear on what I'm measuring here in this particular case my observation was to start writing and to keep writing until the end of the observation period so I'm doing continuous writing on the screen furthermore I was going into a lot of the menus to switch on pen Styles and that sort of thing and then obviously flipping over to new pages so it was a very intensive note taking when you're actually using the note taking app when the app is active um but you're not writing on it then it's not really using any energy at that point at all so to do a test around um you know continuous writing is slightly unusual um but it's the best way to kind of isolate what the impact of battery drain is while you're writing on the app but just know if you're actually using note taking there's a lot of downtime between notes and that would barely drain the battery at all finally uh there's Reddit and Reddit is kind of in between um you know it's a little bit less than Google news so you are doing scrolling you do have an occasional ad playing but it's a lot more text based and as a result of that we see lesser battery drain than Google News at 9.2% actually there's one more and this is for YouTube and YouTube has what you would expect to see which is a very heavy drain on the app because that's including not only audio but you're constantly refreshing the screen um I may have this statistic wrong but it could be 12 frames per second something like that and so it's pretty intensive in terms of um the battery brain and the results make sense in fact if you look at all the apps except for perhaps no taking I think it's pretty intuitive why um why the order is the way that it is so given these drain percentages it's a little bit easier now to kind of think through different scenarios and and how battery life might differ with each so we'll go to the first one which is reading a novel and you're in a bright environment so it requires no front lighting you can turn all your connectivity off because once you download your novel it's all there on the device so what kind of battery life would you expect in that scenario well remember with coobo the ab drain was about 0.9% per hour so pretty py and that results in an expected life of 108 hours so that's pretty good that's a lot of time now this is not an unusual number though for uh reading a novel on an e-reader in fact um a lot of readers excel at just reading text um I don't know the measurements of other e-readers um as well as I do this device and the Tab mini C but um I would imagine that most devices would be able to match or perhaps even exceed this amount so it's I don't think this is necessarily notable for this type of activity but it's still excellent battery life just objectively speaking so this is one extreme example so another extreme example is you're playing YouTube and you're in a darken environment so you've got to use Wi-Fi because you need that connection you're refreshing the screen as intensely as any particular app and you're using that full front lighting as well so this is a heavy battery drain example and you can see all the elements there and it basically results in a device that you'd have just under 4 hours of expected life if you were doing this activity for the entire time so 4 hours versus a little over a 100 is a massive range and so you can see why people with their own experiences and their own combination of usage could come to different conclusions regarding the battery life so let's take a look at what might be a more reasonable example that might more closely align with how people actually use the device so in this particular example we're going to be in you know a fairly well-lit environment so you need some front lighting but you don't have to go all the way we we just want to keep Wi-Fi on because it's convenient we don't want to togg all that back and forth and we're going to spend about a third of our time reading you know a novel a third of the time reading magazines and maybe a third of the time doing notetaking so if we look at those elements the 2% Wi-Fi drain the 1% um um light drain and then the average of those three is about a 5% app drain then we're talking about 12 1/2 hours of expected life for the device and total and I think this is probably closer to what most people will experience obviously than the other two extreme examples um so this represents a little more accurately what the life of the device might be for you so hopefully that information kind of gave you a little bit of a guide as to what you can expect if you were to purchase the device you kind of know what the average per hour drain is of different activities and you if you had a sense of how you're going to use the device you can can simply kind of look at that and make an estimate um based on your expected usage of what the battery drain might end up being so that's kind of the Hope U of being able to publish this information now I'll add a few more points around battery drain first off around charge time um I was able to charge the device 75% of the way and that took a little over 5 hours when it was plugged into the USB port of my computer um if you extrapolate that that means you would go through a full charge in just under 7 hours so that's a little bit uh of information there what I'd like to do uh in charging my devices is I'll charge it before I go to bed at night I'll plug it in and I come in in the morning and enough time has passed um that the device is fully charged and then I'll disconnect it this is how I've always charged my devices uh for years now and it doesn't seem to have any negative impacts on the devices themselves I haven't seen any battery degradation or I haven't seen seen it you know overheating or anything like that in fact I always feel the devices just to to check to see how it's holding up and when I come in the morning it's it's room temperature so that's one thing there another thing I'll point out is around standby time I have not had an opportunity to measure standby time yet um I will do that in the coming days and I will put those results into the uh note section of this video so you'll be able to come back to it later if you're interested what I can tell you now though is that there is a benchmark here which I think is a reasonable rule of thumb the uh tab Ultra C drained about 1% per day on standby mode and then the tab Min C drained about 3% per day on standby mode so I expect this device to be in that neighborhood the 1 to three% range per day and again I will do that measurement and then I'll put this in here um to let you know in the next few days so what does all this mean ultimately is the battery life of the 3C good or not well here's kind of my gut feeling based on all this information obviously the answer is it depends and now you know what it depends on and how that might impact your usage of the device but just speaking in very general terms I do find that the devices battery tends to discharge quicker than other devices that I've worked with it's not dramatic um if I compare this to the measurements that I made with the Tab mini C I think the Tab mini C had a better battery life for these activities but it wasn't by a large margin so I do think ultimately that the size of the 3c's battery does work against this detriment obviously um the flip of that is it does reduce the weight of the device um so that's you know something I'm sure that reduces the cost as well so there are pros and cons to the the size of the battery and ultimately while I do think that the 3C tends to be kind of on the weaker side in terms of battery drain I don't find it unacceptable at all as I've been doing these videos I've only charged it once uh since I got the device uh a few days ago and I've been using it quite a bit so I've been pretty happy with uh the device and the battery life maybe isn't the greatest but I don't think it's particularly gedal either so there it is um I hope you found this helpful uh it's a very complicated question actually and uh you know it is very personal to how you use the device so hopefully I gave you information to be able to you apply to your situation um how this is relevant but um if you have any questions put them in the comments and I'll try my best to answer them otherwise have a great day

Channel: Jeffrey Moss

Views: 9,562

Keywords: 3c, air, air3, air3c, battery, boox, eink, enotetaking, ereading, kaleido, kaleido3, life, note, notetaking, reading

Id: 5CUqOT0QYtM

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023