theoretical battery life on Pinephone

[hiimtye]

I'm just wondering what the projected theoretical max battery life is for the Pinephone.

my terrible years old ZTE Android phone lasts all day with wifi and bluetooth enabled with battery to spare at night time. my wife's phone will last for multiple days.

my Pinephone literally has to turn everything off using CRUST, with no possible configuration in order to not die in a couple of hours, even with the screen off.

this begs the question: what is the projected maximum life we can ever hope to achieve, while having the Pinephone function as an actual phone? surely, if the modem must be disabled in order for the phone to not die from power loss, it can't possibly be considered a usable daily driver.

[bcnaz]

I do not think the modem is completely "Turned Off" in Crust,

It goes to a low power state, my Brave Heart will ring in the morning after being unplugged and sitting on the night stand all night.

But depending on which OS and which release of the OS,  -  the calling party 'may' hang up before you answer the phone.

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It is just   s-l-o-w  to wake up in the low power state.

[User 18618]

It's important to remember that the PinePhone is a jury-rigged PINEA64 single-board computer.

The modem drains the most power out of all hardware and software components - CRUST is a stopgap measure to reduce that drain.

As I understand it, Android devices require a franken-kernel in order to function; Android devices load myriad proprietary modules leeched onto the kernel.

The PinePhone is functioning as a battery-operated (desktop) Linux device with a "mainline" kernel and sunxi/megi patches.

Just a thought

I could be talking nonsense...

[hiimtye]

I understand that Pinephone runs mainline linux, and I also understand that the Android devs have taken controversial liberties with the Linux kernel - for instance they have a devoted thread for some GUI functions - and that most mobile phones come with quite a lot of binary blob patches to have things run smoothly.

don't mistake my intentions with this post - I'm not criticizing the phone or the progress that's been made, I'm seeing if there is a projected reasonable goal, or a known theoretical maximum that is achievable using the current pinephone hardware. again, I am not criticizing production, in fact progress has been steady since I got my UBPorts Edition, and I'm awaiting the arrival of my 3GB/32GB mainboard. I am only questioning whether an all day phone is a realistic expectation, or if the Pinephone is going to require hardware changes in order to achieve that goal.

on my terrible ZTE phone, I can watch YouTube for hours and still have battery life for days. I can leave it with the screen off streaming YouTube videos to my BlueTooth headset and when I go to bed I have plenty of battery remaining. on my Pinephone I can't even suspend my phone while streaming an audio podcast because BlueTooth and wifi are disabled by CRUST. there's no configurability, and it seems like a stop gap for some poor hardware decisions.

[wibble]

I haven't seen any calculations for battery life, and I'm not sure we have the data to do them. You could start adding things up from datasheet values, but that may not be very accurate. I suspect the main limitation will be the modem as it doesn't seem like Quectel have optimised their software for battery operation - but we could just be missing some power saving configuration options.

You can't suspend any phone when streaming a podcast because the CPU is required for streaming. At best you can shut down the subsystems that aren't in active use - depending on the CPU this may include shutting down some cores, clocking the used core down and/or shunting processes to a slower, lower power core. It may outwardly look suspended, but it isn't. Android usually shuts down wifi in actual suspend too - which breaks incoming SIP calls. When there was an option to keep it powered it had a large effect on battery life.

'All day battery life' always confuses me because it's so dependent on how you use the phone, and how much transmit power is needed to reach the phone mast.

[dallytaur]

I think we need to do a drive for a more power effective kernel module it could see this module having tones of uses out side pine phone and other arm cpus. As for now I'm gonna be carrying a beefy battery back from now on.

[jmorris]

this begs the question: what is the projected maximum life we can ever hope to achieve, while having the Pinephone function as an actual phone? surely, if the modem must be disabled in order for the phone to not die from power loss, it can't possibly be considered a usable daily driver.

The modem has some pretty low power modes, at least if we can get anywhere close to what the datasheet claims.  Getting back out quick enough to catch an inbound call is possible (seen mine do it) but apparently a hard problem to get right every time.  A question I haven't seen a definitive answer to is how much of the problem is the wakeup time for the A64 vs the modem.  Have faith it will get sorted, it is just a software problem and folks are determined and know how to eventually beat the issues involved.

The harder problem is going to be the AllWinner CPU.  All modern ARM SoC designs use a big/Little design so background processing (streaming audio, housekeeping, tracking the sensors, etc) can run all day on a charge even if the CPU runs a fair percentage of the time.  We don't get that option, current kernels don't even seem to go all the way down with scaling.  The datasheet implies (page 84) it starts off at 408 MHz.  We can assume it is still stable clocked that slow, power consumption should be a bit better too but maybe power per instruction isn't?.  Even that is not nearly as good a little core designed for 50-500MHz operation and everything in it is optimized to minimize power consumption instead of chase speed.