12. How Long Does The Battery Last? Very Long!

As always we would like to wrap up by answering the critical question concerning battery life.

We applied our familiar, tried-and-true battery benchmark. The test simulates a stylus entry on the display every 30 seconds, keeping the PDA in constant operation. In order to obtain comparable values we set a display brightness of 50 candela per square meter on all devices.

No, our measurements are not a typo! To be on the safe side we even re-verified the results several times. The iPAQ rx3715 with Samsung application processor runs for a full 8.5 hours - the new standard to beat for Windows-based PDAs.

Finally, we would also like to show the effect of uninterrupted operation of the integrated WLAN/PAN module on battery life.

The results clearly speak for themselves. A continually pulsing WLAN module siphoned off almost one and a half hours of battery power, and continuous operation of the Bluetooth module decreased battery life by about thirty minutes.