Tag Archives: device

Battery Comparisons for Blackberry, Android, Apple and Windows Smartphones

You make a plan to meet up with your friends to show off the latest and greatest smartphone that you’ve just spent a small fortune on. Taking it out for all to view, you hit the power button. Nothing. In a mere few hours since buying the mobile device, the operating system used on the smartphone has drained it dry. To avoid this unfortunate situation, compare the iPhone battery to the Windows, Android and Blackberry batteries.

iPhone Battery Comparisons Apple has made it one of their goals to produce devices with extended battery life times. The iPhone battery life has some of the longest talk times currently on the market. The Apple iPhone 4 has talk times between seven and fourteen hours depending on whether the 3G is turned on. This was an improvement over the iPhone 3 battery with average talk times between five and eight hours. However, the iPhone 4S has an average of six hours of talk time. It is potentially caused by the iOS 5 included on the device. Apple is expected to offer an update to correct this problem.

And the Rest… Windows 7 phones use a single core processor which can reduce the drain on the battery life. The Samsung Focus S uses the Windows 7 operating system and users have been able to get as much as twelve hours of heavy usage out of the device before the battery has drained. The Blackberry battery life for the Bold 9780 is six hours of talk time and four hours of talk time on the Bold 9000. The Blackberry Torch battery has almost seven hours of talk time available. Although HTC devices have received some backlash, many of the Android devices from Samsung, Motorola and LG have talk time averages of eight hours or more.

Considerations It is important to remember that battery power differs from device to device. For instance, numerous consumer complaints arose in regards to the HTC EVO battery. Reports came in that the Android device would not last throughout the entire day without the need to be recharged. Although this Android phone has poor battery power, other phones with Android are well-renowned for lasting hours upon hours. For instance, the Samsung Epic Touch has an Android-based OS and lasts for an impressive seven hours and twenty-two minutes of talk time.

Battery Life Tips Want to make your iPhone, Samsung or Nokia battery last longer? Check out whether or not you are on your phone carrier’s 3G or 4G networks. Disabling this feature has the ability to more than double talk times on most smartphones. Also, Android phones are also set for the brightness to be displayed at the maximum levels and lagging times for sleep modes. Change these settings to increase standby and talk times for your Motorola Droid X Battery and LG Optimus and Samsung Galaxy batteries that rely on Android before use operating systems.

SerialSniffer

Developers need exact information and are often forced to get access to serial ports for testing purpose.

The typical user of SerialSniffer is a software engineer. Most commonly an external device is connected to a PC, which is running a special application using a serial port. The external device may be: a sensor, a slide projector, a printer, a barcode scanner, … The serial connection has to be “ripped” and SerialSniffer is mounted in between the serial link. SerialSniffer will provide all data from one side of the connection to the other and vice versa, log all the data and, if applicable, manipulate them.
SerialSniffer

is a windows shareware to visualize data, which are exchanged over the serial ports (i.e. RS232 or RS422).
SerialSniffer gives you the possibility

– to have a deep view inside the data. The data stream, which is exchange on the serial ports, is visualized by SerialSniffer. You also can determine which data comes from which port.
– to log the data stream
– to tunnel the serial port through the network
– to exchange dedicated data parts from the data stream
– to search for seldom data
– to open a terminal dialog
– to use symbols instead of raw data

SerialSniffer is very easy to use

Simply choose the type of connection (serial, network or virtual serial port), the parameters (i.e. baud rate) and open the connection.
Not only the standard baud rates (like 9600 baud) but also user defined baud rates can be used. It is also possible to translate between different baud rates, as both comports can be configured independently.

Comport names up to ‘Com256:’ are supported to use SerialSniffer on systems with a lot of serial ports (provided by additional adapters, IRDA, Bluetooth etc).

The complete configuration will be stored automatically on closing the application. The user can also store it in customized files to re-load it for recurrently tasks.
Practical example

Test of a complex system: a test specification exists; SerialSniffer logs all the data to a file, which is attached to the test protocol. But how to test, the system deals with errors on the serial link? If the worst comes to the worst, the system will crash. To test this, SerialSniffer gets a set of rules, which data is to be manipulated. I.e. some datasets may be shortened, some may contain additional data or the checksums are changed. In most cases, it is not allowed to integrate the changes to the device under test, because you will not test the original system anymore. Using SerialSniffer, you are no longer forced to do so.
Practical example

Once, we had the mission to develop a trip recorder for a ferryboat. The main computer of the ship dumps all the data on a serial port without a return line (one way street for the data). During the development, we were not able to travel with the ship all day long. So we recorded the data with the SerialRecorder of SerialSniffer (similar to a traditional tape) and did a playback as often as needed.

SerialSniffer

Developers need exact information and are often forced to get access to serial ports for testing purpose.

The typical user of SerialSniffer is a software engineer. Most commonly an external device is connected to a PC, which is running a special application using a serial port. The external device may be: a sensor, a slide projector, a printer, a barcode scanner, … The serial connection has to be “ripped” and SerialSniffer is mounted in between the serial link. SerialSniffer will provide all data from one side of the connection to the other and vice versa, log all the data and, if applicable, manipulate them.
SerialSniffer

is a windows shareware to visualize data, which are exchanged over the serial ports (i.e. RS232 or RS422).
SerialSniffer gives you the possibility

– to have a deep view inside the data. The data stream, which is exchange on the serial ports, is visualized by SerialSniffer. You also can determine which data comes from which port.
– to log the data stream
– to tunnel the serial port through the network
– to exchange dedicated data parts from the data stream
– to search for seldom data
– to open a terminal dialog
– to use symbols instead of raw data

SerialSniffer is very easy to use

Simply choose the type of connection (serial, network or virtual serial port), the parameters (i.e. baud rate) and open the connection.
Not only the standard baud rates (like 9600 baud) but also user defined baud rates can be used. It is also possible to translate between different baud rates, as both comports can be configured independently.

Comport names up to ‘Com256:’ are supported to use SerialSniffer on systems with a lot of serial ports (provided by additional adapters, IRDA, Bluetooth etc).

The complete configuration will be stored automatically on closing the application. The user can also store it in customized files to re-load it for recurrently tasks.
Practical example

Test of a complex system: a test specification exists; SerialSniffer logs all the data to a file, which is attached to the test protocol. But how to test, the system deals with errors on the serial link? If the worst comes to the worst, the system will crash. To test this, SerialSniffer gets a set of rules, which data is to be manipulated. I.e. some datasets may be shortened, some may contain additional data or the checksums are changed. In most cases, it is not allowed to integrate the changes to the device under test, because you will not test the original system anymore. Using SerialSniffer, you are no longer forced to do so.
Practical example

Once, we had the mission to develop a trip recorder for a ferryboat. The main computer of the ship dumps all the data on a serial port without a return line (one way street for the data). During the development, we were not able to travel with the ship all day long. So we recorded the data with the SerialRecorder of SerialSniffer (similar to a traditional tape) and did a playback as often as needed.