EEVblog #80 - Nokia E71 + Garmin Mobile XT = Embedded Hell

Dave cuts loose on the ridiculous battery life on the Nokia E71 mobile phone. And the code monkeys at Garmin and Nokia get a serve too.

The main website is here:

All the smart viewers hang out on the forum here:

[watcherofvideoswasteroftim]

Whatching this in 2015 puts things in proportion. "Only 1, 5 days of batterylife"? You'd be lucky getting more than 8 hours a charge today.

[skonkfactory]

I actually wrote the chapter on performance and power consumption in the Symbian kernel internals book. It specifically says not to do half the things Nokia loves to do, and the exact thing Garmin did.

The truth is, there are millions of lines of code in that phone; it's running a big, sophisticated OS. While power consumption was certainly a major driver in its development, like Steve Jobs said, real artists ship.

[EEVblog]

@dan20n It's been 11 days now and I've still got two bars left, so they have *finally* fixed the battery issue after all these years. The E72 is out now I believe.

[JoseEnriqueMarforiIII]

Thanks, was just about to get the Garmin XT, my Nokia E71 lasts me a 2 weeks and a couple of days, and that's like one 5 min call every other day. Thanks for saving me the grief I would have gotten from it. Thumbs up to you!

[EEVblog]

@danielruffo13 I use the phone mostly in standby mode. And I now get 20 days battery life again now that I have removed the app. The software was badly written and chewed the life even when the program was NOT running.

[redtails]

I don't actually think it was a software thing running in the background. I think the navigation software just kept the GPS sensor on all the time, so you don't have to cold-start it when you start up your navigation. I think this mobile phone was before A-GPS, so it would probably take several minutes to get your location data from a cold start. Waiting several minutes for location data was apparently seen as worse than 2 days of battery life, so they opted to enable the GPS sensor all the time. that's my guess

[EEVblog]

@eydryan
Why shouldn't I take standby time seriously?
I rarely use my phone at all, but have it on all the time, so long standby power is VERY convenient.
I now get TWO WEEKS battery life out of my E71.

[tomvleeuwen]

The HTC G1 is advertised as 5, 5 days. I can actually achieve that when everything is turned off. I found that out when I was on holliday where 3g is not an option.
But since I have to charge it every day, the battery was broken (blown up like a balloon) after a year.

[michael]

@EEVblog hey man... can you tell me what to do on my 5230 nokia? also symbian... but instead of 400h of battery life on standby i get agbout day and a half to maximum three days... i make an average of 5-10min a day of calling and not playing cause i'm on the move all the time and really dont have the time to charge the damn thing...

[EEVblog]

@AllenKll The E71 was one of the officially supported device. For a company the size and resources of Garmin I would certainly expect testing to have picked up this issue.
It's not impossible to write generic apps that do not effect the device, if fact it's not hard if you follow some rules, especially when the app is NOT running! Garmin are clearly just shit at doing this.

[EEVblog]

@shiftplusone80
Not when it's advertised as having up to 480 hours standby! The fact that it now works as such proves that it was always capable of the advertised duration, so it's just inexcusably bad firmware design.

[LoneTech]

Ovi is just one of Nokia's brands - for their online features. The maps are Navteq, which Nokia bought a few years back. Did Nokia finally get free navigation to the E71? Because when they announced it, they hadn't enabled the nav function, only broken the preferences.
As for the phone itself, I could rant for days. Unfortunately I didn't have a better option when I got it.

[ElTonyYorugua]

Gamin XT is a battery killer. The tsautostart.exe can be seen through any task manager software and killing it doesn't help coz it comes back soon. Garmin has changed the software after 5.10 to include an option to stop this service. You can find it here: Tools -> Settings -> System -> Launch Background Service (select disabled here) Also important to note that the above has to be enabled once then garmin has to be shutdown and reopened to select disable again.

[michaelhawthorne]

I feel your pain Dave, I had a Samsung D900 for awhile and was really happy with it, the pictures it took were stunning and with a 2 Mega pixel sensor too if I remember.  When I 'Upgraded' to the Nokia E71, I thought I was getting something with bells and whistles, I was wrong, very wrong.
I came to realise the keyboard was a pain to use as it was so tiny and the centre button for scrolling was a bad design too. 
The worst thing for me was the camera.  The pictures were washed out and didn't have the vividness of the D900.  I think the camera on the Nokia was somewhere around the 5 Mega pixel range so should have been much better than the Samsung but no, I wanted my D900 back quite quickly.  I couldn't wait to get rid of it.
the Sat Nav part of it was ok and I used that but doesn't compare with Google Maps today, even if Google Maps keep changing things around.
The E71 was awkward to hold, it felt like it was trying to jump out of your hand all the while, I felt sure I was going to drop it every time I picked it up.
I think these were the beginning of the Smart Phone era.

[chukchee]

What about the iPhone? Is that any good?

[PentiumMHz]

My Nokia N93 lasts 1.5 - 2 days with or without Garmin Mobile XT (I use an external BT GPS receiver with it), so I just plug it in when I go to sleep.

[gbowne]

Dave, i love when you call some things a "heap of shit". LoL.

[EEVblog]

@ParadigmaticShift May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage!

[AllenKll]

Garmin is not really to blame.Think about it.They need to make a generic app that supports many different platforms. If Garmin was specifically targeting the e71, then they CAN customize the power consumption, and you'd get somewhere near the performance of the Nokia maps software..

The reality is, a generic software house CAN'T do that, and still expect to turn a profit. It's just not feasible. Add to the the proprietary-ness of the hardware and Garmin couldn't even if they wanted to!

[mnovo]

My BB gets 8 hrs, but I drive it like a Ferrari on a race track. Ha!