Battery life. It’s the most important part of any mobile experience. You don’t want to be constantly afraid that your battery won’t last through the day or the time that you need it to last. That’s why any operating system, regardless of whether or not it’s on a phone, a laptop or even a GPS device, should always be able to squeeze the most out of that most sacred of parts on your device of choice.
I know this blog post has been a long time coming, but I’ve had quite a few things keeping me from sitting down and actually getting any writing or testing finished. So, onto my results, but first, what I’ve been working with. My netbook is an ASUS EEE PC 900 (German model) with a 4400 mAh battery. The laptop and battery were bought almost two years ago to the day and I’ve been vigilant in preserving the quality of the battery itself to make sure it always lasts as much as possible.
What has all this brought me, though? A pretty damned good mobile experience when coupled with Jolicloud 1.0. I managed to get an average of about 2 hours and 15 minutes out of a fully charged battery while using my wifi modem, 20% screen brightness with dimming on idle and a CPU clock speed of 675 MHz. Jolicloud starts you at 450 MHz as your initial clock speed in “Powersave” mode for when running only on battery. This works pretty well but I found that even at this speed the netbook was maybe a bit too slow for comfortable web browsing. Everything rendered nicely, but maybe just a touch too slow even though it was perfectly easy to live with. When I run my EEE PC under Windows XP on battery, however, it underclocks itself to 600 MHz so to make the testing a bit more fair I kicked the clock speed up a bit to get closer to Windows. What I absolutely love about Jolicloud (and Linux in general) is the ability to play with the clock speeds so you can save power whenever you want. There is an “On-Demand” function available in Jolicloud, but this doesn’t work on my 900 MHz Pentium processor (this is where I wish I had an Atom processor, but such is life for early adopters), so I really have no idea how well this works in Jolicloud (likely very good when you consider the quality of the OS in general).
In this testing I did web browsing, video watching, document editing in Google Docs and just generally anything a normal person would do with their netbook. Certainly if I was just sitting in a lecture I could underclock the CPU even further and squeeze a lot of juice out of the little sucker, but I think what I got out of it is quite respectable. I also didn’t drain the battery entirely. I probably had maybe another ten minutes in it, but Jolicloud popped up telling me that I had 1% capacity remaining and most of the time these battery meters in operating systems are quite inaccurate, especially on the older EEE PCs, so I’m not really sure I would trust it. I shut it down promptly after getting this message, saving the material I was working on and then recording the time it came up at.
I’ve been told in the past that Linux is not always perfect when it comes to power management on mobile devices but I must say that I am quite impressed with the offerings from Jolicloud here. In Windows I get about the same amount of battery life out of my netbook that I have here with Jolicloud. My results range from 2 hours and 15 minutes all the way up to 2 hours and 45 minutes. This depends, however, on what I am doing and how much battery saving I am doing. In XP, however, my only options are to disable wifi and the camera whereas in Jolicloud and I can underclock the CPU down to 450 MHz (there are options below this but they automatically set the CPU to 450 MHz), something that is impossible under Windows unless you start messing with eeectl, a Windows application that has been known to make your EEE PC do funny things but does allow the user to play with the clock speeds of various parts of the computer.
So in closing, with Jolicloud you’re getting an OS that can give you the same kind of battery life you can get out of your Windows machine, if not potentially better, and that makes Jolicloud a real winner in my book. Then you add to the fact that your apps are always synced across all of your Jolicloud machines, there is free and fast support (in many different forms), it’s an open source project and its ease of use and you end up with a truly killer OS.
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