Battery Life of the Tab Mini C: I Did the Work So You Don’t Have To
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- čas přidán 8. 07. 2024
- I’ve been asked by a few folks regarding what the battery life is like on the Tab Mini C and I’ve found it difficult to answer those questions. So I went off for a week, recorded 25 observations for a total of 12 hours, and can now come back and answer those inquiries with some authority. The following video chronicles that decent into madness. Not really, but I do explore what things actually drive battery drain and I think the results are interesting and applicable to other devices as well.
0:00 Intro
1:54 The Gory Details
4:45 Refresh Mode
6:21 Wifi and System Full Refresh
8:30 Reading A Book
10:32 Front Lighting
13:03 Apps
15:22 Wrap Up - Věda a technologie
This is so well-design research and report, Thanks a lot for your contribution
Thanks for the information! It's interesting to know that the front light drains the battery life by so much than I would have thought!
Thanks for doing this review! Very insightful :) your viewers appreciate the effort
Thanks for clarifying that you found the being connected to WIFI was not so much of a drain. My reading about it had said the constant checking of wifi was indeed a drain, so my plan was going to be to turn off wi-fi and ONLY turn it on when needed. So it would be on to do a download or a syncing. The simple turning of pages while reading would mean it need only be on while reading and could be totally off when not even using it., That is a way to save battery. So using a sarcastic tone one could say a battery can last for a whole year when charging it once a month if it is not used. I think ALL devices should have replaceable batteries, period. How would anyone like it to learn a car would need to be replaced every time a battery wars out?
To have non replicable batteries must be the most disgusting thing about the tablet industry and Samsung is NOT on my good people list as they are that type of company. So that is why Ratta Supernote which plans to have replaceable batteries is great. I am waiting for the A4 sized device with replaceable battery that is said to come out this year.
Every manufacturer needs to be planning to have batteries that are replaceable by "laypeople" to comply with upcoming EU legislation. They've got until 2027 to do this. That's a lot of new Boox models away..
In the past, that's exactly what I did as well, that is to say turn off wifi except when I needed it. I'm going to just leave it on now that I know it isn't much of a factor. You also reminded me of another point I forgot to mention in the video. My experience with most devices is that if you go to full shut down, the battery life is more or less preserved, the downside being that you then have to experience a long boot sequence every time you need to use the device. I prefer standby mode which does introduce battery drain (I get about a month on the Mini C in this mode) but if one used their device intermittently then that might be a good trade off to extend battery life overall.
Nice shout out to Supernote. I need to do more videos about that device. I actually use my A5X more than any other device (it's my daily driver at work) but I think I've only done one video that featured it.
Thanks for the detailed breakdown! This all makes me really want a monochrome Tab Mini that I could use with less front light.
I've heard the same sentiment from others as well. There is a Tab Ultra along with the Tab Ultra C, so I don't see why there can't be a Tab Mini to go along with the Tab Mini C. Maybe one will be announced in the fall when Boox traditionally releases new products.
I was starting to wonder why my device needed to be charged every day, and honestly I was also starting to worry when I recalled some products descriptions that stated A WEEK of battery life. But yeah, one doesn't have in account that it is the best case scenario, using it as a simple Ereader.
Point is this is way more than just an Ereader, and I personally didn't buy to just read books (I have Kindle Paperwhite for that). I grab it due to its tablet capabilities and performance, mainly web surfing, and eventually a little bit of video too.
So to summarize, unless my Tab Mini came with a battery problem, for me, using it about 75% for internet NeoBrowser, another 15% for playing chess online, and the rest for other random stuff, I need to charge it everyday. And I am not even the whole day using it, just like 6-8 hrs per day.
So sad to know the capacity will be dropping even more with time.
One thing I don't understand (14:00) is why you would only measure Kindle with reading comics. I assume most people use it to read books. I'd really like to have a comparison between these apps while doing the same thing.
The one thing I learned - if you don't really want or need color, get one of the black-and-white devices. Because they have much better contrast than the Kaleido color screens, and therefore you need to use frontlighting a lot less, and as a result get much longer battery runtime.
I guess it's kind of arbitrary on my part, but I like to use Kobo to measure reading a novel and Kindle for comics. That's actually how I use my devices in practice. Kindle is superior for comics due to the cell by cell navigation, especially important on an 8" screen, while Kobo has been a bit more energy efficient for books in my experience (at least that's been true in the past, I'm not sure if that's still the case).
Thanks for this! I managed to find a buyer for my Nova Air C so now I can buy the Tab Mini C! Just waiting for it to be available in our local online stores (trying to avoid import taxes lol). Can't wait
Neat! Let me know how you like it. I still think it's great -- I'm really happy with it.
@@jeffreymoss Good to hear that! I'm hoping my selling my new-ish Air C and getting the Mini C is worth it, so I'm glad that you like yours. I'll let you know how it goes with mine :)
Thanks Jeffrey. Kindly do another battery life test with the Ultra C if you can. Appreciate your work. Future sounds very exciting.
I'm a bit exhausted by the work on this one, but I can see maybe doing some sample battery tests on the Ultra C to get a sense of how it might differ. As long as I don't have to do a full suite of tests, I can probably cook something up.
@@jeffreymoss I definitely understand and can only imagine how taxing it was. Hope you get some rest and like you said before there might not be any new iterations of the kaleido 3 yet, so take it easy. You don’t have to do it. Just an idea if you are free. Take care and hope to see your new videos soon.
@@Englandflick Thanks for that. I should clarify that it isn't arduous, but it does take a lot of time. So that's really what I meant to convey. But I just downloaded a new book and am ready to read, so I'm going to do some measurements that way. I actually got a Kindle Paperwhite just for comparison, so I'm going to do tests there as well to get a sense of how each fares. If it's an engaging novel, I might get a few nice results in the coming days.
Ok, just one test in, but very interesting! In this case, I used the Kindle to read a novel, and put in about 49 minutes. The drain was notable, at around 5%. This was much worse than what I had with the Mini C and Kobo, but not that different then when I used the Kindle on the Mini C for comics. So that raises an interesting question, is it the app or the device which is driving the drain? I'll keep plugging along . . .
A brief update. I'm reading the same novel on both the Ultra C and the Mini C and recording the results. The app is Kindle. The battery drain is fairly comparable. So this is furthering the suggestion that the Kindle app does in fact drain more than the Kobo app, and that's the driving difference in my prior results, not the device itself. Still need to do more test on the Ultra C to continue to validate that, but for now that's my thinking.
Thanks for taking the time to dig into this. How would you say the battery life compares to the Nova Air C?
Ray
Well, I know the stand-by battery drain is the same on both devices, so that I have measured (they both get about a month). But I haven't done detailed battery tests on the Air C like I did with the Mini C. So to answer your question with only my gut and past experience to guide me, I'd say they are pretty close to each other.
Considering the main result of this video is that most of the power drain is caused by the frontlight... I'd assume that it will be quite similar on another color screen device like the Nova Air C.
Thank you very much for the hard work.
Please, could you make the comparisons between Bigme Galy and Tab mini C.
Maybe something similar to what you did, between Inknote plus and Tab Ultra C.
Thanks!
I hope to take another look at a screen comparison soon, probably Kindle Paperwhite vs. Bigmy Galy vs. Mini C. Some folks are buying Kaleido 3 devices and posting how unhappy they are with the darkness of the screen. I don't mind the darker background myself, but I see value in putting out a video that makes it clear how these screens differ so folks know before they buy. That might be my next video, so stay tuned.
@@jeffreymoss Thanks!
Chat cut off my last message I think, but I was just saying thanks for all the information!
Yeah, it cut me off as well! Thanks, much appreciated!
I cant believe comics use so much!! surely the color ink should make no difference.
However, I guess you would be turning pages a lot quicker.
It might be the app. I did some reading on the Kindle and the usage was not nearly as good as with Kobo. I'm going to try comics on Kobo and see what happens then.
@@jeffreymoss Keen to see how that goes! :)
@@BrianHallmond Ok, I read a comic on both the Tab C and the Mini C using the Kobo app on each device and the same settings. Both devices were roughly the same, and twice as good as when I measured comics on the Kindle app using comparable settings. So two takeaways here. First, the Mini and Tab have similar battery drains (at least in this particular case) and second, it wasn't comics that was providing the battery drain before as much as it was the app itself. I guess Kobo does a much better job in that regard. I should note that comics still drained more than standard reading, cutting that battery life by more than half. Which makes sense as there is a lot more going on with each page.
'Promo sm' ✨
15 minute video to say, "The battery lasts XXC minutes"?! Come on.
Well, it depends.
It's not black and white. Literally.