Palm Pre Battery Details: 1150 mAh, Same as Centro 24
One of the details that Palm refused to address during their Keynote and also during their one-on-one time: battery size and battery life. Well, let's answer one of them right now: the size of the battery will almost surely be 1150mAh, because it uses the same battery as the Palm Centro and the Palm Treo 800w.
During our one-on-one, we asked Palm to remove the battery door, pretty much expecting them to refuse. Instead, in a sign of their new openness, they happily did and I got a peek at the battery. Though Palm had to follow their rule of not talking battery, they did admit that, yes, I wasn't wrong when I said that the battery looks identical to the Centro battery.
Now, it's possible that Palm will try to cram more milliamps into the battery space (ala the Extended Battery for the Centro and 800w, but the bottom line is we're likely looking at a 1150mAh battery in the Pre, 1350 mAh at the very best. Update: Jenn from Pocketables reports in the comments on on her sit that the the battery is 1200mAh, which is certainly possible -- but the overall size of the battery definitely looks the same.
You might be thinking that's a little small and you're not wrong about that -- but listen: we have literally no idea how the webOS handles batteries, power management, and the like. Until Palm releases the device, we're not going to know how it performs in real life.
Special note: although the Treo 800w doesn't have stellar battery life, it has a much longer battery life than pretty much any other Windows Mobile device with similar specs and similar battery size. When Palm says that "Mobile is in our DNA," they mean it. They have the know-how to pull every quanta of energy out of that battery efficiently, so we're still anticipating that the Pre will have more than acceptable battery life.
24 Comments
It should also be noted that recharge time on these guys are almost negligible. I've found that I can get almost 50-75% charge back on a little under an hour. Not that bad for sitting at your desk and/or a car drive.
Excellent news for Centro and 800W users, we should have no trouble getting new batteries when the original ones wear out.
I looked at the website for the TI processor and they say something about a ultra low power setting for when the phone is idle...so that could stretch standby battery life significantly.
That is very true, the TI CPU has a low power setting that practically turns off the processor when idle. However, the big issue is the radios are really what use the most power.
If the Centro's little screens and weaker processors manage to kill these tiny batteries off so quickly, it seems very optimistic to believe that an untethered Pre will do much better.
My money's on Palm expecting the screen to be dimmed down, and the phone tethered to a charger much of the day if you actually USE the Pre phone.
Hope I'm proved wrong, but Seidio and others have made very profitable business models out of designing and selling larger batteries and other things that Palm should have done right in the beginning.
Sounds... interesting? Hard to know what to make of it.
FYI Dieter, I received this message although west3man.blogspot.com is a valid url/site/homepage: "The URL of your homepage is not valid. Remember that it must be fully qualified, i.e. of the form http://example.com/directory."
There was no apparent e-mail information for you, so I mention it here.
So we can probably use the tmobile android g1 as a good proxy for the pre.
android is based on linux and the tmobile g1 has a 1150 mah battery.
Lots of people have been complaining about the battery life of the g1.
Its hard to quantify how long the g1 battery lasts because everybody's usage is different, but I can typically get about a day's worth of usage before I need to recharge the battery. I use the g1 more as a mini computer than a phone so most of my usage is using the browser and 3g/wifi data access.
The g1 hardware has similar specs to the pre.
3.2 in capacitive touchscreen with 480
If I were going to get the Pre with all of the great new features and capabilites, I can only assume I'll be using it more often than my Centro. But having the Centro battery in it is dissapointing. Unless that sucker is super effecient on power usage, I'll have to keep it charged all the time as I do with my Centro.
Just my 2 cents.
Good Luck
The Palm rep I spoke to at the Pre lounge at CES said the battery was 1200mAh. That's what I have in my notes from that night (5th bullet point near the end of the post): http://www.pocketables.net/2009/01/inside-the-palm.html
Thanks, Jenn - updated the story!
While I do like to pop in a memory card, I am with Apple that on such a small portable device I do not need to swap the battery. Actually I do not want to. If I run out of battery, I would much rather hook up an external USB battery. No need to shut down the device, the battery can be recharged at the same time I charge the internal battery via an USB port, its probably cheaper and the internal battery can be bigger for the same weight.
I'm surprised to find someone who feels that way.
I run the heck out of my batteries, so the more charge, the better. In lieu of that, I guess I'd say, the more power options the better (i.e. user replaceable battery).
An external usb battery wouldn't interest me as much, though, because it would be more of a pain to carry around, wouldn't fit with the device in its pouch, and would keep me from using the usb port for other things like file transfer, tethering, etc.
My expectation for a smartphone has ALWAYS been that they have a shorter time between recharges. I use my current Palm phone the Samsung i500, for tons of things besides just calling, so therefore I use more power.
It has always amazed me that people expected these more powerful devices to not need to be charged more frequently. I don't complain that my laptop needs recharging after not many hours of use.
So, I charge in the car, and I charge at home - no big deal. I'm glad Palm didn't put a huge battery in the Pre - I don't want an extra large battery taking up space and weight in my phone. When I buy the Palm Pre I'll gladly buy the larger aftermarket battery. No deal buster for me.
re: "It has always amazed me that people expected these more powerful devices to not need to be charged more frequently. I don't complain that my laptop needs recharging after not many hours of use."
I'm amazed that you're amazed. Just as there are people who want their phone's batteries to last longer, there are people who want their laptop battery to last longer. So, they prefer devices that are built with better batteries or power optimization features.
Question, though: If you "don't want an extra large battery taking up space and weight in [your] phone," why, when you buy the Palm Pre will you "gladly buy the larger aftermarket battery?" Seems contradictory to me, but maybe I'm missing something. More importantly, it seems like you understand us power-busters more than you think. :-)
What amazes me is what's the difference between carrying an extra battery or an extra USB charger? It's still an extra!
I think the benefit of consumer-replaceable batteries is more device longevity, even though Li-ion batteries have banished memory-effect there's still the issue of service-life, and eventually they do need replacing.
The Pre's hardware sounds good enough to thrive for quite a while before the next best thing is touted as a Pre-Killer (which isn't something from the Minority Report)
I'm certainly looking forwards to the Pre release (well the actually consumer release in UK), but will also be keeping a really keen eye on how Palm WebOS and Google Android fare with the developer community.
This is good news. Hopefully it will provide the same performance that it does on the Treo 800w and Centro. I'm not sure that will be the case though seeing that this phone will obviously use more system resources due to its processor.
If the designs of the batteries are essentially the same between the Pre, Treo Pro, Treo 800W, and Centro, then Palm or a 3rd party (Seido?) should be able to offer a replacement battery cover that allows them each to work with the Touchstone charging base. It seems like that would be easy Touchstone & battery cover sales for Palm to offer this now, before the Pre is even released. They need all the sales income they can get, and this would not require waiting on the FCC.
While I have a deep-seated worry that Palm will fumble the Pre in some way, this is speculation for the sake of it.
While we can make some estimates of battery life based on its (supposed) capacity, the fact is that the Pre is based on completely new hardware (http://tinyurl.com/723ur3) and no one outside Palm knows how much juice it uses.
Maybe we need a Pre battery life sweepstake to make things interesting...
Excellent news for Centro and 800W users, we should have no trouble getting new batteries when the original ones wear out.
It'll take more than the same battery to charge a Centro or 800w on the Touchstone--it takes the right charging contacts, which those phones don't have. Even if you replace the back cover, there has to be a power connection between that new cover and the circuits in the phone for the charge to reach the battery. That isn't there, and any effort to retrofit would be bulky and probably not cost-effective.
FOR the palm pre i wish the battery life last longer than any other phone of its classe. but no comment stated on this all i know is that it will be charged by induction with the palm stone www.palm.com the video tend to take a long time to load up but hang on there is about 2 hours of explanation about the palm pre
This is good news. Hopefully it will provide the same performance that it does on the Treo 800w and Centro. I'm not sure that will be the case though seeing that this phone will obviously use more system resources due to its processor .
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Ruth
http://systemmemory.info
This new information was also available at Palm.com as well. Premium Linux hosting account with DDos Protection designed for small and medium websites.