My experience with the Freerunner

[ian douglas]

Thanks for your thoughts, Marco.


Marco Trevisan (Treviño) wrote:
> I agree, and we can't ask you more than testing like you're doing.

As of today I have 165 minutes remaining of my 1,000 minute TMobile SIM 
card, so I'll have to restock it to do any more tests. I think TMobile 
still has their "1000-minutes for $100" special going on, so I'll stock 
up later this evening.

> The only thing I'm asking to you, Ian, is to report the GSM signal 
> strength in your testing zone, just to complete the informations you've 
> already given.

Fair enough. I'll report on that when I get home as my office building 
is probably more shielded than my apartment. I live near the beach, no 
mountains to really speak of, and my AT&T phone, which was always 
showing EDGE connectivity at my old apartment always shows 
full-bandwidth "3G" at the new apartment, which is partly why I wanted 
to do some testing around my old apartment.

> Anyway, I'll appreciate so much if another one of the lucky Freerunner 
> owners could make a battery test (also just a "standby" one) in a place 
> with low GSM coverage...

As soon as my Freerunner is back to full-charge, I'll try to emulate 
Einstein's standby tests with all 4 components (GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth, 
GPS) turned on, then off, and report my own findings. I'll try to do it 
with both SIM cards, if that makes any difference, and without any SIM 
at all -- I'm curious if having no SIM card will emulate "low GSM 
coverage" with the phone trying to constantly register on a network.

Since I have 5,000 evening/weekend minutes with AT&T, once I fill up my 
TMobile card again, I'll take my Freerunner and Blackjack 2 on errands 
this weekend, see if I can spend more than 6 hours connecting the two 
phones again in varying locations around Los Angeles.

If anyone else has suggestions on how to test battery life, I'd love to 
hear them. Especially from Michael and Steve, as they can probably 
direct us a little better on what kinds of real-life scenario testing 
they'd like us to help in.

I'm going to see if I can write a CPU-intensive script to run on the 
Freerunner too, see if I can time how long the battery will last with 
the CPU running 100% ... again, just a curiosity.

-id