Last Updated on October 2, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
- Chris Titus Tech mentioned on his YouTube channel that one one the issues of the PinePhone is the short battery life of only a view hours.
- There are different values which can be found about the battery life of the PinePhone and we do not know of any systematic studies about the battery life of the PinePhone.
- We made one single test with the PinePhone running idle with the additional keyboard battery pack for more than 24 hours.
- We mentioned previously that we are looking for a SBC which can run 24/7 without interruption, charging over night is acceptable, as well as swapping batteries.
- Is the PinePhone suitable for this purpose?
- We set the settings of the PinePhone to switch of the display after one minute.
- The PinePhone screen becomes completely dark after a minute.
- This did not happen with Pi screens in a previous test:
- The Pi screens become dark but not completely, and it is visibel that they are still enlightened.
- We where not able to stop this with the Pis.
- This seems to have been solved better with the PinePhone.
The following table shows our test results with values from a single test.
| Device | configuration | running mode | battery (mAh) | battery life (hrs) | source |
| PinePhone (not Pro) | PinePhone attached to PinePhone keyboard which has an additional battery pack for the PinePhone | PostmarkedOS running in idle mode | Unknown, see the specifications of these devices | longer than 28 | tested by MRIS |
Issues we had with this device and this setup:
- We do not know if the PinePhone went to sleep mode during this setup which would explain the long battery life. We did not study the PinePhone power management in detail to check this.
- There is no charging indicator for the PinePhone keyboard.
- We solved it with a special cable which shows how much watts the keyboard draws during charging.
- If the keyboard is fully charged, the cable shows zero watts. The cable is avaibable on Aliexress.
- The charging indicator of the PinePhone did not update correctly. After several hours it shows still 100 charged which is not possible. Only after a reboot of the device the value was updated
- We had to restart the PinePhone twice during this test since we had a freeze when we wanted to check the battery level.
- After around 28 hours running time we received a warning that the battery of the PinePhone is low and we stopped the test.
- To get both the PinePhone and the keyboard incl battery pack fully charged, whe had to take them apart and charge them seperately.
Further issues we had with the PinePhone
- The setup with the PinePhone we tested here was between 300 to 400 USD if bought and imported to Switzerland, since shipping costs and import taxes for the PinePhone are not optimized.
- A similar setup which can do the same built from for instance Pi components costs much less.
- Resellers as for instance Digitec Switzerland which almost sells anything does not sell the PinePhone:
https://www.digitec.ch/en/producttype/showdiscussion/pinephone-10746
- This means we do not have any warranty for this expensive device in Switzerland.
- We sah that one or the other eBay sellers had the PinePhone on stock, but only temporarily
Capacity PinePhone battery:
- 6000mAh battery the Pinephone keyboard battery
- 3000mAh battery Phone
- total 9 000 mAh.
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