iPhone share of U.S. traffic hits 69%

I'll try and confirm this when I'm in the US in a couple weeks, but when I was playing around in the DFW area with data roaming disabled, I wasn't able to get the time from AT&T (although the time zone did update) but as soon as I came into a wifi area, the clock updated as well.

So you're saying that productivity is the only valid motivation or legitimate reason?

The iPhone isn't a PDA. You can't run a lot of important (to many people) applications on it. But the buyers most likely already know that. They want a mobile web browser, phone, and music/video player all in one.

If someone wanted a device to use for a lot of texting, to edit documents or spread sheets, or to use while traveling outside their home country with a prepaid SIM card, they wouldn't get an iPhone. But for those that use it as an entertainment device and a phone, it's a pretty good product.

I did analysis of using that type of battery monitoring system (monitors up to four individual Li-Ion cells in a pack) for a laptop. It's nice information to know, but the reality was that a) it didn't prolong the life of the battery pack, b) to charge each cell individually did not speed up the charging time by much, c) it added expense to the charger, the laptop, and the replacement battery packs, d) did nothing to increase operating time per charge. It does give you slightly more advance notice that a pack is losing capacity, but the goal of the project was to find ways to extend operating time for a given size pack. Putting four temp sensors in the pack, and adding more contacts for charging and monitoring, and adding expense to the charging circuitry is something that the military might want to do, but it's not going to happen on most, if any, laptops. OTOH, you'll definitely see more expense put into electric vehicle packs where fast charging time is a feature that can be marketed, and where you will have 70-80 Li-Ion cells in series and dividing them into smaller groups of for charging will speed charging time.

Boy are you asking the wrong person for cites!

There are no notebook computers that use a non-switching power brick. It would be absolutely enormous to have a 65W-130W non-switching supply. You still see lower power non-switching adapters for some low-power, low cost, consumer electronic devices.

There are some more size-efficient switchers, but there are trade-offs, especially thermal trade-offs.

What Apple did with their magnetic latch charger is pretty nice. Some small kitchen appliances, i.e. my Zojurishi water boiler use that system. It prolongs the life of the connectors.

This has never occurred in the past, and is unlikely to occur in the future.

On Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:05:45 -0700, SMS wrote in :

Indeed -- he should be asking you.

Agree on nearly all of your points: there are gains, but for applications where there aren't that many cells and that cost is a major factor, the gains aren't necessarily big enough to chase after. FWIW, the applications where I've seen it was highly interested in maintaining a higher % of original capacity after a cell(s) started to degrade, as this extended the overall battery pack life (IIRC, the pack was designed to output ~80kW for 10-15 minutes...not quite your typical laptop).

I know, which is precisely why Mr. John Navas came up empty (again), despite his claim of:

"Lenovo ThinkPads have long since featured state-of-the-art power and battery management, with multi-stage charging and sophisticated battery monitoring."

(cite: )

I know. Documenting the hypocrisy and bad behavior of John Navas merely reminds Navas that he is again insisting on being a pompous fool, and even though such arrogant and dishonest fools are unlikely to change, a better man can and would change.

With change in John unlikely, what's more likely then is that it will merely serve to be a legacy for his children and grandchildren... who will invariably eventually be interested enough to do a family genealogy project... to find, and to learn just how unhinged John was, back in the early 21st century. Hopefully, they'll be successful in their life, despite how despicable John Navas has tainted their bloodline with his dishonesty and the like...however, the point is that any success that they may have will not be due to him, but

*despite* him. Even if they never confront him with the question ('Grandpa John - why were you such a flaming asshole?'), they'll still know it to be.

-hh

Having worked directly with both IBM and Legend (Lenovo) on power management, it's true that they did have state-of-the-art power and battery management. As did Compaq and Dell and Sony and Toshiba and others, who all used pretty much the same ASICs from a very few vendors in the battery packs and notebooks.

There's only so much you can do to reduce power use. You turn off everything that's not being used, you reduce screen brightness, and you run the core at as low a speed as possible, trading off performance for lower power (which can also be counter-productive if tasks take you a lot longer to complete while the screen and disks are going). What Transmeta did, monitoring the demands of the application and changing the processor speed thousands of times per second was clever, but what killed that was the fact that as geometries shrunk, the biggest user of core power was leakage, which didn't vary with MHz by much.

Similarly, on the battery side, you put in charging circuitry that trades off between battery longevity and charging times, but everyone has access to the same technology.

There are almost certainly reasons that we don't know that causes the behavior we see. We should be more sympathetic.

One might consider it to be sematic hair-splitting, but if techniques such as per-cell weren't being used because for that application they didn't offer an adequate bang-for-the-buck gain, then it can be argued that they weren't "state of the art", but an applied version which in some circles is sometimes referred to as "state of the shelf".

The 'shelf' phrasing refers to what is available 'off the shelf', and alludes to the trade-offs that are made from factors other than merely technological goodness that have defined the marketplace's availability.

-hh

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This shouldn't surprise anyone. The some phenomenon exists in politics. Extremists always have far more in common with each other -- even when they're on opposite sides -- than they do with reasonable people.

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James Carville and Mary Matalin come to mind...