EEVblog #80 – Nokia E71 + Garmin Mobile XT = Embedded Hell
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at
1:35 am
Dave cuts loose on the ridiculous battery life on the Nokia E71 mobile phone. And the code monkeys at Garmin and Nokia get a serve too. The main website is here: www.eevblog.com All the smart viewers hang out on the forum here www.eevblog.com
Tagged with: EEVblog • Embedded • garmin • Hell • Mobile • Nokia
Filed under: Garmin Video Reviews
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What about the iPhone? Is that any good?
Dave, i love when you call some things a “heap of shit”. LoL.
i won’t buy another Nokia as about 6 years ago they blamed me for the restore software failing to work after my phone had been serviced. I was left with punching in everything again manually so all the contacts went into a new Sony Eriksson. bye bye Nokia.
Get a Jail Broken iPhone or a Google Nexus one phone. Both have built in GPS software and decent battery life.
@AllenKll The E71 was one of the officially supported device. For a company the size and resources of Garmin I would certainly expect testing to have picked up this issue.
It’s not impossible to write generic apps that do not effect the device, if fact it’s not hard if you follow some rules, especially when the app is NOT running! Garmin are clearly just shit at doing this.
I love the videos were you go off on a device. Something about them makes my day
The HTC G1 is advertised as 5,5 days. I can actually achieve that when everything is turned off. I found that out when I was on holliday where 3g is not an option.
But since I have to charge it every day, the battery was broken (blown up like a balloon) after a year.
Garmin is not really to blame.Think about it.They need to make a generic app that supports many different platforms. If Garmin was specifically targeting the e71, then they CAN customize the power consumption, and you’d get somewhere near the performance of the Nokia maps software..
The reality is, a generic software house CAN’T do that, and still expect to turn a profit. It’s just not feasible. Add to the the proprietary-ness of the hardware and Garmin couldn’t even if they wanted to!
Ovi is just one of Nokia’s brands – for their online features. The maps are Navteq, which Nokia bought a few years back. Did Nokia finally get free navigation to the E71? Because when they announced it, they hadn’t enabled the nav function, only broken the preferences.
As for the phone itself, I could rant for days. Unfortunately I didn’t have a better option when I got it.
@EEVblog Don’t get me wrong, I hate the “up to…” standard for specifications. Should just be “average” then +- certain percentage or standard deviation or something meaningful.
@shiftplusone80
Not when it’s advertised as having up to 480 hours standby! The fact that it now works as such proves that it was always capable of the advertised duration, so it’s just inexcusably bad firmware design.
My nokia updates never worked!
I think most people who have these sort of phones are used to having the device plugged in and charging when they’re at home. At least I am. My current phone (HTC G1) gives me about 1.5 days of heavy use or 2.5 with an extended battery. I think that’s pretty reasonable for the sort of functionality it offers. I reckon smartphones aren’t for everyone. If you just want to make phone calls and not have to charge the phone all the time, there’s no need for a smartphone.
I actually wrote the chapter on performance and power consumption in the Symbian kernel internals book. It specifically says not to do half the things Nokia loves to do, and the exact thing Garmin did.
The truth is, there are millions of lines of code in that phone; it’s running a big, sophisticated OS. While power consumption was certainly a major driver in its development, like Steve Jobs said, real artists ship.
This industry drives me insane with that shit. It’s bad enough when they lie about stats to sell an item, but you can’t even count on the data sheets to be accurate, and you can’t even count on the components being to spec. It’s an extra big mind fuck for those of us who are terrible at memorizing numbers.
There should be enforced truth in advertising laws, worldwide.
Next they’ll be telling you there’s a dozen eggs, when there’s only 2.
@ParadigmaticShift May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage!
My htc desire has 750 hours standby, but it’s not cheap.
Ahhhhhhh, its the flying spaghetti monster…. run for your life!!!!!!
@dan20n It’s been 11 days now and I’ve still got two bars left, so they have *finally* fixed the battery issue after all these years. The E72 is out now I believe.
I have it’s older cousin the e61i, the battery life is excellent I usually get one week per charge and I use bluetooth.
I was considering an upgrade to the e71, perhaps Ill look elsewhere
So Dave……. Tell me what you really think!!!!
Great video as usual.
I like the Nokia energy usage program. Nice to know where all the “standby” power is going!!!
What a shame. I had the Nokia E61 and absolutely loved it.
Garmin software is useless for sure.