starting the idle battery benchmark again

I am starting the idle battery benchmark again: that is I am charging my 8200 up to full charge and will start it IDLEing with GMail this afternoon, and will leave it going until the battery runs out. I think some of the recent changes will have reduced the battery use when idling.

I have also written a little application that reports battery charge so that I can more accurately record the battery use each hour. There is a script running on a server that sends an email to my gmail account every two minutes. This is intended to simulate a heavy load. Vibrate to alert for new messages is on. I am not going to use the device in the mean time, so the screen backlight will not be a significant factor.

Also, I am running this test using my T-Mobile pay as you go SIM, which has the advantage of being able to see how much data is used, so not only will I have a view of battery life, I will have a better understanding of real data use when idling.

Results follow

After three hours, the battery is reporting 89%

After about 2 and a half days the handheld battery is below 10% and so tiggit mail has quietly closed the connection.

In truth, there were a number of interruptions to the test, with sessions needing to be re-established. There is still plenty to do on the session re-establishment algorithm, but at least all the messages were delivered and for the most of the time the idle session was maintained.

The real problem is that I did not have a “control” example of a completely idle BlackBerry and one receiving the same number of messages via BIS/BES push.