Analyst: Flash Could Be Hogging PlayBook Battery Life

iPad had been in design for 11 years predating the iPhone. Chemistry, battery engineering, operating system level power management, product design, optimization, all contribute to the absolutely outstanding battery life of the Apple iPad. Often copied but never duplicated, the iPad has been selling at nonstop phenomenal rates since going public in April last year. Due to the larger screen size, the potentials of the iPad is magnitudes greater than the smartphones spanning all use cases and processes. With the astounding iPad and Apple’s legendary product refresh cycles, the only impediment to iPad’s total dominance off the technology landscape is Foxconn’s production capacity, which is the only reason why competitions are braving the absolute odds in venturing into the iPad cloning business. These competitions are not fighting Apple, they are fighting for the scraps left over by the iPad. Customers who want a little more than the iPad buy the MacBook Air. Nothing can be simpler for all to see clearly.

> six hours on a device thats almost half the size

The PlayBook screen is 48% of the size of the iPad screen, therefore it should get better battery life than iPad because the screen is by far the most power-hungry component. Even with half the battery of iPad, it should get 10-12 hours.

FlashPlayer abstracts the hardware and app from each other so they can’t cooperate on saving battery. An iPad can put part of an iOS app to sleep to save power, PlayBook cannot put part of an AIR/Flash app to sleep. FlashPlayer is an extra layer that replaces either the Web layer or native layer on a device. An extra layer means more power use. It’s always a resource hog because it has so many ways to use additional resources. Web pages with 5 FlashPlayer ads use more power than Web pages with 5 HTML ads. Turning off FlashPlayer adds 25-50% more battery life to a device. Fact.

We do know how RIM developed their OS: they bought it 6 months ago and slapped it on a portable device.

Multiple cores is a feature of all 2011 ARM chips. It’s not a feature that is unique to RIM, who are using off-the-shelf parts. iPad 2 will use a custom Apple chip that will be unique to Apple. So at the SOC level, Apple will have a singular advantage, not RIM.

1) Yes. Multicores are a feature of all 2011 ARM chips and is also why all 2011 ARM chips have better performance AND battery life than their 2010 counterparts.

2) I have no doubt that turning off flash increases battery life, but I don’t think you can equate and unoptimized version of flash on the macbook air to an optimized version running on a platform built around Adobe Air.

3) You have no idea is QNX was working on a mobile platform, which sparked RIM’s interest in buying the company in the first place. Unless you have some insider information, you are making a BIG assumption that can’t be backed up.

4) You’re assuming that the extra display real estate equate to a 1:1 loss in battery life for every extra cell available to the the larger footprint. I think if you examined the actual extra power usage you’d see the extra cells provide more capacity than is used by the extra 3 inches of screen real estate.

Like I have repeatedly noted – an OS is not an easy thing to do.

Has anybody noticed how Apple spent a couple of years developing Snow Leopard – the effort mostly spent on refining and optimizing the OS – making it smaller and faster? Gee – I wonder why they spent so much effort on this?????

OH wow, OK now that would be really annoying!

http://www.anon-web-tools.edu.tc

Thinner, lighter, last longer.

That’s what sells.

True in chewing gum, true in mobile devices.

You know, Jobs clearly stated in his keynote when he introduced the iPad that it had to be superior in a number of key funtions or the market would simply reject it and continue to buy netbooks.

He was right.

I’ve had the displeasure of testing a Samsung Tab and it’s just aweful.

It is probable that Android tablets will catch up, but they have/will sacrifice some functionality/features in order to accent others.

Overall functionality and quality of user experince CANNOT be underestimated.

Clearly, Apple understands that continues to hit the sweet spot. And once again, Apple’s competitors scramble to catch up.

iPad is the answer to resource hungry yet grossly underpowered netbooks. Dual core CPU’s running under QNX is an oddball that goes against QNX’s design as microkernel for embedded AC powered devices. For realistic realtime systems and applications like airline bookings, financial transactions and trading you must use the IBM zOS mainframes which provide teraflops of computing power running on top of state of the art big iron using world fastest transaction processing systems like IMS TM or CICS on top of finely tuned DB2 DBMS in order to concurrently support millions of human and systemic computing requests, absolutely not the puny QNX, calling QNX a realtime microkernel gives the true realtime IBM mainframe a bad name.

Apple OSX and iOS are dedicated to humans, not machine level multitasking. For multitasking or even multithreading computing resources turn to the OSX and if needed, the IBM mainframes. The mainframe zOS can crunch a transaction file of millions of records in a few seconds which would take QNX weeks if not months to process. I you want to be techie, then be techie about it. iPad is the ideal machine for general human computing and social needs so stop pretending the QNX is a IBM mainframe class machine complete with great multitasking and multithreading. Any Apple Mac can dance around anything Rim can make in power, apps availability, functionality, and pure engineering superiority. The iPad is in a totally different category. I believe Rim and the other competitions to Apple are simply trying to confuse the issue by pitting non-iPad related topics trying to sidetrack the consumers who simply want the best user experience there is, and that is the iPad. Isn’t that the reason why consumers had all walked away from those QNX and netbook touting geeks and crazy scientists in the first place? If Rim still doesn’t get the ideas on why it is losing out so miserably, then perhaps should consider stop trying to be someone which it is absolutely not. Stop copying Apple!

One demonstration of this non-Apple talks which are total misfits is using Flash on the IBM mainframe applications. The poor unsuspecting culprit using Flash to bog down thousands of production users and even executives from doing their jobs is liable to getting his asses kicked out of the workplace amidst tons of curses from all sides with the fire alarm sirens blaring right over his head on the way out the door.

Why does every article turn about Apple in the comments section? You need to delete all the SPAM!

John – Thank you for your vote of confidence here – I do appreciate it.

My broader point here is that Apple, alone of the tech companies, (virtually alone period) thinks in these broad strategic terms. Not where the puck is, not where it will be, but where it will be in 3-5 years. They prepare, they research, and they wait – if necessary – until the time and the technologies are right. Only then do they move.