124 replies to this topic

[nubie]

If it's 3mm thicker, maybe that's room for a stylus :-P Though the DS Lite stylus is about 5mm, and then you need room for the plastic mold around it :-P

I read that the stylus goes behind the front ports/switches and in front of the battery, if possible (small enough volume slider and audio/video out.)

[TyBO!]

I would rather have the higher capacity battery. The added weight and (marginal) size increase don't bother me.

[Tobriand]

I'm a huge fan of battery life... I really miss the old NGPC days of 20 hours battery lives when I really didn't need to charge more than once over a holiday.

As others have said, though, it'd be useful to have a bit more info than currently there - crucially, are we talking 16 hours of MP3s (which is useful, but probably tanslates to ~7 of gameplay) or 16 hours of psx, Quake 3, or some other fairly taxing program? With or without WiFi enabled?

Obviously some of this may still be undr NDA, but it is at least important to know whether 16 hours is at heavy load or not and how long the lighter battery would be expected to last at comparable loads.

I'd also be more comfortable if one of you stuck an extra 3mm of card to the bottom of the current mock-up and tried that out for a couple of hours. It's been a LONG time since anything has had thickness comparable to the original gameboy (32mm), and I must say that if 16 hours is estimated at high load (psx/Q3/etc) and if the alternative were ~12 hours, I'd be tempted by the thinner battery. It still beats the bejesus out of the competition, and presumably, battery life would be even better for less power-consuming things (PCE, NGPC, Genesis et al).

[nubie]

I'd also be more comfortable if one of you stuck an extra 3mm of card to the bottom of the current mock-up and tried that out for a couple of hours. It's been a LONG time since anything has had thickness comparable to the original gameboy (32mm) snip

Is this 32mm with it closed? Because open it won't really be like the GB

unsnip , and I must say that if 16 hours is estimated at high load (psx/Q3/etc) and if the alternative were ~12 hours, I'd be tempted by the thinner battery.

That was my general feeling, but the off-the-shelf nature of the battery is something that I like (unless it is a shelf of overstock going out of production )

[Tobriand]

Nah, I'm thinking of the thickness with it closed. It's still added thickness to the size it needs in a pocket, even if its significantly less once opened.

Not that I can't manage with such (it'd just go in my coat pocket rather than my jeans one), but I do think it might severely limit it's appeal to the "ooh it's so thin" crowd.

Agreed, idd, re: the off-the-shelf nature of the battery, but my intuition still tends towards "if it can run an intensive psx game and stream from youtube (not at the same time) for 10 hours on the thinner battery, go thin". If it can't, then thick.

[nubie]

Totally right, if the OMAP packs as much power as everyone seems to think then lower clocks and 10 hours on 65nm seem totally possible.

I would spring for 10 hours on a smaller battery as well.

The catch22 is that we won't know what the real battery usage is until it is out in the wild with some apps for it.

The beta units might help out with this, but the first app should be a battery burning graphically intensive tester that will let us know if the battery is necessary.

(judging from the real life vs anticipated battery life the bigger one might not be a bad idea.)

[Shiny]

As long as I get at least 5 hours of game time between recharges I'm fine. I for one think that 27mm is already at the far reaches of what is acceptable today, and would love for it to be around 23mm, but I doubt that is a possibility. 3mm more just brings it closer to the clunky hugeness of the Gameboy (which I love anyways (: ).

I'm problably coming off as some sort of techophile with an obsession for the thinnest devices possible, so I'll stop now.

[God Ginrai]

My DS Lite is 38mm thick, thanks to the awesome Nerf case that I have for it, and it fits in my front pocket fine, WITH a wallet as well. A 30mm Pandora will actually be lightening the load for me. ;P

-God Ginrai

[arconreef]

yes, 16 hours would be awesome. I don't care about the weight

seconded, though I wouldn't want to go past 400 grams

Edited by arconreef, 21 March 2008 - 02:27 AM.

[timofonic]

I don't want another GP2X, so please at least more than ten hours of heavy use. Weight is not so important really while it's approximately the size of a DS or a little more bigger.

[Kramy]

I'd prefer the larger hi-cap battery, that way if we overclock, we'll have a better battery life, OR if we put in addons (like bluetooth, or something else) we'd have an average battery.

Squidge's idea is nice, but I don't want a machine with a cheap battery, I then have to buy another battery for $xx when it should have been installed in the first place.

Weights not much of an issue, i had the original block gameboy, with the screen magnifier, lightsource, stereo speakers, etc. that thing was massive.

Weight isn't terribly important to me. ~700 grams is pretty light. 1kg is pushing it for one-handed use...

Just don't give it a horrible battery - and please remember, although you may be able to get super cheap Li-Ion batteries in the US, up here in Canada we've got to fork out $15 on shipping/taxes if we can even locate one. I would much prefer that it came with the heavy duty long lasting battery.

And yeah...I had a gameboy...I used one of those massive power bricks. That thing was heavy, and had lopsided weight. Try to avoid lopsided weight; if it's balanced, it'll "appear" that much lighter.

[craigix]

We have decided to stick to 27mm and a custom battery size to use every last mm of space, the battery will be ~4000mah.

According to our calculations it should work for up to 100 hours(!) playing mp3s. We won't know about using powerful apps until we do some further tests, but we are aiming for that magic 10 hours. It should easily get 10+ hours running recompiled GP2X apps.

[Prophet]

We have decided to stick to 27mm and a custom battery size to use every last mm of space, the battery will be ~4000mah.

According to our calculations it should work for up to 100 hours(!) playing mp3s. We won't know about using powerful apps until we do some further tests, but we are aiming for that magic 10 hours. It should easily get 10+ hours running recompiled GP2X apps.

That would be f-ing awesome IMO.

[Shiny]

According to our calculations it should work for up to 100 hours(!) playing mp3s.

O_o is that a typo?

[Karel Jansens]

We have decided to stick to 27mm and a custom battery size to use every last mm of space, the battery will be ~4000mah.

According to our calculations it should work for up to 100 hours(!) playing mp3s. We won't know about using powerful apps until we do some further tests, but we are aiming for that magic 10 hours. It should easily get 10+ hours running recompiled GP2X apps.

Frakking awesome! After doing some extrapolations based on unavailable data (i.e.: "guessing"), that'd mean 10+ hours of video off a charge! That's three seasons of "Red Dwarf"! (well, the short seasons, not the very long last two seasons)

Teehee! Me happy puppy! Actually, me happy, soon to need major eye surgery puppy.