My experience with the Freerunner (was: Any Stats on Battery life....)

[ian douglas]

I'm also doing some testing on a Freerunner for Michael and Steve, and I 
have one thing to share about battery life.

With the ASU software, with no power saving at all, I placed a phone 
call to my Freerunner with a T-Mobile SIM from an AT&T phone. There was 
no audio, just two phones sitting side by side. The next morning, of 
course, the Freerunner was completely drained (my AT&T phone was plugged 
into its charger). The phone call lasted 3 hours and 52 minutes -- just 
shy of 4 full hours.

I'm running another test right now with power saving turned on (dimming, 
no locking), to see if that has any additional impact on call life. 
There's also minor audio going on, as my wife is in the office/nursery 
building some cabinets for the baby we're expecting in October.

Once these, and a few other power-related tests are done, I plan to 
travel around Los Angeles a little, testing the tri-band coverage in 
various areas of the city.

I've written a few notes to Michael off-list about the ASU software, but 
wanted to share that of the various test calls I've made to/from land 
lines, VoIP lines (with Vonage) and various cell phones on AT&T and 
Verizon to the Freerunner with both AT&T and TMobile SIM cards, I've 
only had a single call with no outgoing audio. The SMS software is very 
basic, but complete (no MMS tested yet).

The terminal application is usable, but the new keyboard isn't terribly 
useful as there are no slash ('/') or pipe ('|') characters which are 
pretty necessary for using a command line.

I'm also ordering an 8GB SDHC micro SD card to test some 8GB storage 
usaes. So far the 512MB micro SD that shipped with the phone works 
great. I'll test it with a 2GB non-SDHC micro SD when this next phone 
battery test is complete.

Since others have covered the packaging and accessories, I won't bother 
to echo their notes too.

More later,
Ian Douglas