[NTLK] Battery life w/ Einstein

[Matthias Melcher]

On Apr 21, 2014, at 6:50 PM, Lord Groundhog <lordgroundhog at gmail.com> wrote:

> ~~~ On 2014/04/17 20:42, Mr Jonathan Dueck at jonathandueck at yahoo.com wrote
> ~~~
> 
>> Hi, all!
>> I'm curious: is anyone using Einstein as a "daily driver" on their Android,
>> iOS device, or Windows/Linux tablet? I keep imagining trying this out, but
>> haven't taken the plunge yet--beyond installing Einstein and fiddling with it
>> a little on my phone & Mac. But if you've tried it out as your go-to
>> scheduling / note-taking etc. device, and have thoughts on usability or on
>> battery life, I'd love to hear it!
>> -Jon

> I'll second the interest in this question.  I've recently upgraded my phone
> to a Samsung Note 3.  It comes with a stylus and it makes a real attempt at
> making sense of one's handwriting.  If I'd never used my MP2100 I probably
> would think it was pretty good, but after the Newton, it just feels so
> ignorant.  It can't be taught to recognize handwriting, it doesn't always
> recognize spaces between words, it insists on making the same mistakes over
> and over even with the commonest words (again, not learning), and not all
> apes can be relied upon to do the same thing with written input.
> 
> I guess I'll need to put up with the handset a little longer since I can't
> really afford to change it, but if I at least could somehow make this phone
> Newtonian next time I replace it, that would give me something to look
> forward to.  

For every instruction in the original NewtonOS, Einstein runs about 200 to 300 instructions on the host machine, needing about 200 to 300 times as much power. Then again, during sleep cycles (and NewtonOS makes great use of all kinds of power naps and sleep cycles), the emulator is smart enough to let the host system sleep as well. 

So as long as you do simple stuff (like viewing the calendar), battery usage should be reasonable. If you use the CPU a lot (hand-writing a novel), the impact will be quite big.