Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting

[John Gilmore]

> On a different note, one test we might think about running is the 
> closest thing the industry has to a "standard" battery life test.  It's 
> specified on a lot of the netbook specs.
> 
> It's defined here: http://it.jeita.or.jp/mobile/e/index.html
> 
> However, I'm also seeing that a lot of vendors are choosing not to use 
> this test because it generally results in a number higher than what the 
> typical user will actually get.

I looked it over.  Companies report the average of two measurements:
The hours of power available when the machine is dialed down to
minimum power, screen at its very dimmest (reflective mode for us),
doing nothing, everything disabled.  And the other measurement is when
the system is playing back an MPEG movie, in a small window and with
relatively standard OS and display settings.  (We can't do this out of
the box, but we could install an MPEG codec for the test, and run it
that way.  Or transcode their test movie to Ogg Theora and try that
for simplified release testing, until we have to report an official
number using MPEG.)

It would be useful for us to measure and improve the numbers in
both of those modes -- but the average will be highly misleading to
everyone.  Still, it would provide a comparison to netbooks and other
computers.

It would be nice if our runtime in the minimum power mode could in
9.1.0 be almost equal to our "lid-closed suspend time", which I
measured in #7879 to be 8 hours with mesh/wifi chip on, and 44+ hours
with the mesh/wifi off.  Actually, it won't be that good, because the
test requires that the screen remain on (perhaps consuming 0.5W),
though the reflective screen means we can turn off the backlight.  So
perhaps we'll get 16 to 20 hours in that mode.  If so, averaging with
perhaps 2 to 4 hours of active runtime, for a total "standard" number
of about 10 to 12 hours would still be pretty good by comparison to
typical netbook products.

[First we'll have to fix a bunch of bugs...]

	John