PDA battery always going flat

[IO540]

I have had an HP4700 for a couple of years.

It works OK but half the time I pull it out of the bag, the battery is flat.

Reasons include

1. Accidental button press wakes it up (this can be disabled in the Settings)

2. Accidental movement of any device in the CF slot wakes it up (cannot be disabled in any documented setting)

3. Accidental movement of the SD card wakes it up (likewise)

4. Accidental movement of the battery securing plastic pieces, causing the battery to come a bit loose, wakes it up and then kills all the data in RAM

The above are fairly typical of pocket/pc devices as a whole - every PDA I have had does the same.

When the battery goes flat, you lose all apps and config except the bare operating system, and have to go through the stupid initial config where you have to calibrate the screen and then copy/paste the stupid text from one page to the next.

First Q is whether there is any registry setting which can take care of 2 and 3.

Next Q is whether WM2005, with its flash-based memory model, helps in any way with existing apps. I am still on WM2003. The reason PDAs have these data loss problems is that all apps and config is held in battery backed CMOS RAM, not in flash.

[Keef]

I use an iPaq 5555 (old but good).

I bought a Fellowes case for it. When it's in the case and the case is shut, it's held completely still and there's no way anything can press any button. Since I've had it in that case (about two years) I've never had a flat battery problem.

It has an SD card in it, and removing and plugging in the card doesn't make it turn on or off.

I keep a spare battery in my "handbag" just in case - but have never needed it yet. The iPaq has a small backup battery - I'm not sure what it does that the main battery doesn't.

In other words: not a problem!

[ZH875]

Have you had a look at: http://www.mobilitysite.com/forums/ipaq-hx47xx-series/ Some good gen can be found there.

ZH

[anybodyatall]

with regards to your last question, sounds like you could definitely use wm2005 :)
see http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2005/07/14/438991.aspx

[Basil]

Had a related problem with two Xda IIi mobile phone/pocket PC machines.
There's an internal battery which SHOULD hold RAM whilst swopping main batteries but has failed to do so on both machines (after working OK on the second for some time)

[IO540]

Thank you for the pointers.

Reading the wm2005 stuff, and even allowing for any forum getting mostly negative feedback, there seem to be many compatibility issues with wm2005, especially if using software that was wm2003 or (in many cases) pre-wm2003.

I have stopped using PDAs for anything half serious anyway, but the 4700 is handy for checking email and doing quick replies. And for getting TAFs/METARs for flying.

Is there a 640x480 PDA with WIFI, GPS, GSM/GPRS?

[beardy]

You ask,
Is there a 640x480 PDA with WIFI, GPS, GSM/GPRS?
If you don't need the phone, or are happy to blue tooth to you mobile then the Fujitsu Siemens Look series may be for you. I am very happy with my N560 (wifi, gps and blutooth.) Available on e-bay for aprox £230 (retail at £330+.)

[IO540]

N560 looks great - I am amazed this has totally passed me by :)

I can't find any price below £300 though, Ebay or elsewhere.

How good is the GPS? Have you run any mapping applications on it e.g. Oziexplorer?

Does WM5 run old software e.g. stuff written pre-wm2003? Most of the nice aviation apps for W&B etc are quite old.

Have you tried it with a 4GB or 8GB SD card? Most things don't work with a > 2GB SD card.

[beardy]

e-bay pricing was on a bid, not buy-it-now, but 4 went for about that price, all of them new and under guarantee.
GPS takes a little while to initialise (5min or so) but mine will do that on the move. I use Tom Tom (UK) and it's fine. The voice is very quiet, poor loudspeaker, but you can run a headset or blue tooth to earpiece. GPS and bluetooth soaks up the battery so I use an adapter (unfortunately not a standard fitting, but compatible, with an adapter, with USB output voltages.) Battery extenders & high capacity batteries are available.
I run older apps and so far had no issues (but no guarantees!)
I have only used a 2gb card. I understand that it will use higher capacities, but not the higher speed ones (but I could be wrong.)
Skype works well on it.

[IO540]

I looked at the N560 carefully just now. It looks really good. Unfortunately it doesn't have GPRS/3G and there are no SD GPRS/3G adaptors that I can see (though no shortage of people waiting for one).

Currently I use a CF GPRS card (RTM-8000) and a CF GPS card (HI-305) in the HP4700, which has CF and SD slots.

Most GSM-enabled devices are phones, and some of these do have GPS, but not wifi. I would much rather have GSM (GPRS/3G) than WIFI - the probability of getting connectivity (for aviation weather, particularly) at a random location is far greater than with WIFI.

The HP4700 does exactly what I need and does it well. The problem is the auto power-up feature, which ensures the battery is flat most times I need it - even when I keep it in a protective case.

[ZH875]

The IPAQ turns on at midnight to perform some administrative functions - you can't prevent this from happening. What kind of setting did you have for it to turn off on battery power? Had you left anything like Windows Media Player running or WIFI or Bluetooth when you turned it off? If so, when it came on at midnight, it might have detected activity and stayed on (this will happen if you left music playing and then turned off the IPAQ).


It could be your email trying to connect to the internet every 5 minutes or so.
It could also be a number of pieces of software, any weather software trying to do an auto update.
Just look at the settings of your software and see if any are trying to connect automaically.


May seem like a simple thing, but mine stopped turning on spontaneously when I turned the HP Protection tools OFF. While on, the 4705 seemed to come to life at the same intervals that it was set to lock the system. Now that I turned it off, it hasn't happened since.

[IO540]

There don't seem to be any software features in this PDA that do that.

As far as i can tell, the turning on is caused wholly by it being knocked, and the momentary contact breakage on the SD card triggers a hardware interrupt which results in powering up the PDA.

I've had some communications with Microsoft on this who say that nobody knows of a way to stop it, even though it is a common problem :ugh: What a load of bull - I am a hardware/software engineer and one could deal with this by intercepting the message and dumping it, anytime the unit is now operating.

If I was a large corporate user with 10,000 of these things, I am sure M$ would fix it.

[Mike6567]

Rather a late addition to this subject.
I have a iPAQ H3970 used for navigating (my car) using TomTom 5. It works very well.
A couple of occasions recently the battery has gone flat, however recharging it gets everything back working OK. This is strange as I thought if the battery went flat the applications would need reinstalling.
Maybe the battery didn't go as flat as I thought.

[IO540]

A pocket/pc PDA is meant to shut down quite some time before the battery goes flat enough to lose the data in the volatile memory.

However, a PDA draws some power (several mA) all the time anyway, so it doesn't take much longer - perhaps 1 more week - before you do lose the lot.

It's a stupid design, done for the business executive lifestyle where it lives in the office or home charger base and travels with the owner for a few days at a time, max. The rest of us are trying to use these toys for real stuff (like flight planning, GPS moving maps, etc) for which it was never intended.