Last Updated on October 1, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
We where surprised by the long battery life we reached in a first test with a Pinephone and a battery keyboard:
- But Cytrus Tech reported much shorter battery life times of the Pinephone pro not matter what you do between 1 hours with the Pinephone Pro alone and several hours with an additional battery keyboard:
We have set the power saving options of our Pinephone to switch on at the shortest time possible in our first test. We do not know if this caused the phone to go into a sleep mode, which would explain the long running time of the Pinephone in our test.
Raspberry Pi s do not offer power saving options out of the box. There are instructions available on YouTube how this can be done for the Pi 4 with scripts. The Pi 4 uses about 600 mAh in idle:
after optimizing it for low power consumption it drops down to 410 mAh, this is about 30 percent power saving which is possible with the Pi 4. But the YouTube video maker mentions that Pi zero s are better power saving solutions than the Pi 4.
Pi screens
Pi screen power management is poorly developed. It is for instance not possible to switch of a Pi screen and switch it on again without rebooting. The Pinephone in contrast offers a sleep mode which can be activated when pressing the power button. Such a feature is not implemented in Pi s out of the box.
Android phones are known to be very power efficient. Most contemporary devices run easily more than 24 hrs. with a single charge. Why then not choose an Android phone as a Pi screen, if low power consumption matters? There are several instructions for this available how to do this. We have mentioned some in our journal:
https://petergamma.org/category/singe-board-computer-displays/