HP Prime Battery consumption analysis

[jebem]

Excellent work, Eried, Thank You for sharing your analysis here.

Thank You Joe Horn for the info on battery replacements, very useful.

[springer5]

So did anyone find out how/where to get an actual genuine replacement HP battery (not SGS3 one)? If HP don't sell (which is a disgrace in itself btw) them where do they get them from. Somone must sell them surely.

This is one of the things that puts me off Li-ion powered devices. Great when it's new but 1 year in when the battery has started to get tired what do they expect us to do, just throw the device away? And how much longer will the GSG3 be around if it comes to that, it's been around for a while already... what when that is discontinued. Plus we shouldn't have to rely on another manufacturer to provide the necessary equipment to use use my HP Prime for it's lifetime anyway.

With AA or AAA batteries you just go to the corner store and you can run your calc until the device itself dies....years and years and years. I think powering the Prime with Li-ion is a backward step. I'd rather charge it slightly more often with AAAs and just replace them cheaply and easlily whenever I need to , rather than a battery which lasts slightly longer between charges but then what...you buy a new calculator just to get a new battery ?? Madness.

[Tim Wessman]

(07-08-2015 03:04 PM)springer5 Wrote:  If HP don't sell (which is a disgrace in itself btw) them where do they get them from. Someone must sell them surely.

The batteries on the shelf can only sit for 1-2 years before needing replacement (sitting discharged is actually really bad for this type of battery). HP, like nearly all electronics manufactures, no longer sells low volume small part items. If the stock of batteries doesn't move quickly enough, they will be dead and done before they even made it out of the warehouses.

Besides, why wouldn't you want a battery that would probably be 3x-4x cheaper then what HP would sell it at which also happens to increase your battery life by 30% or so. The crux of the usefulness in AA batteries or similar is ubiquitousness, cost, and availability. I think we've come about as close as it is possible to get for a lipo battery unfortunately.

Quote:Great when it's new but 1 year in when the battery has started to get tired what do they expect us to do, just throw the device away?

If you use a very aggressive .5 week between draining the battery (in reality, most people seems to be in the 2-3 weeks range), you are looking at ~100 or so charges per year. Considering that most batteries won't start having any user noticeable impacts for 200-300 charges, and probably up in the ~500 range before it gets problematic - you've actually got a really long life with even an extremely aggressive (dare I say unrealistic?) use estimate!

Remember, this isn't a phone being charged and discharged daily! Were it, I'd agree with you 100%.

If you use a more typical 2 week of use estimate, you've now pushed out the life into the 8-15 year range by all best information I can gather. Provided your processor and memory hasn't worn away from all the wear and tear of those electrons racing along, or the tin hasn't grown to short circuit your board, or the plastic hasn't absorbed polutants and become brittle, or (insert some other myriad of thing that can kill modern electronics).... chances are your battery will be the least of your worries.

The reality is, nobody knows what happens with respect to the long term with the current crop of battery technology. Most of the manufacturing techniques and chemistry changes (slightly) enough every 1-2 years that there is NO data regarding this. Before considering a rechargeable li-poly battery we spent a long time consulting battery experts both in and outside of HP to try and get longevity information. Unfortunately, it just doesn't exist.

Quote:And how much longer will the GSG3 be around if it comes to that, it's been around for a while already...

True, but consider that you can still purchase batteries from many vendors all around the world for the Galaxy S (2010). That is already 5 years old and you can still buy a battery for it.

An internal rechargeable battery was simply a requirement for the product. For every person like you or I who considers that a drawback, there are probably another 99 or more who think it is amazing.

Thanks for your thoughts!

[springer5]

Thank you for taking the time to reply Tim. I appreciate much of what you've said.

Unfortunately it is just a sad fact of life that GOOD Li-ion replacement batteries are increasingly hard to find in my experience (which is mostly with mobile phones). There are many cheap 'copies' around which will last a few months at best and the success (abundance) of these is driven by a bizarre desire for all things cheap and rubbish, even if the internet is plastered with people regretting their false economy, it still continues.

I take your point about the usage rate being typically much lower for a calculator and your lifespan figures are much more encouraging than my 'assumptions' (again based on the only experience I have which is mobile phones).

Despite all that I personally think a design model based around a non-replaceable (for all intents and purposes, except by happy coincidence with Samsung) 'custom' battery is a massive backward step and I still don't really understand the why the market would demand it. Maybe most users will only keep their calculators for a year or two anyway, so for them it doesn't really matter, or baybe most people just don't question any further than what the 'marketing machine' tells them - i.e. Li-ion is the latest, most fashionable and therefore must always be the best thing to have powering your device. I'm clearly the odd-one-out in that regard.


Thanks again for your reply.

[StephenG1CMZ]

When I heard that the HP Prime needed such batteries because of the colour screen and faster processor I did consider the 50g.

I wonder whether the Prime could switch to AA batteries if the faster processor were retained and the screen omitted.

Of course, some of the power saved by omitting the screen would be required to send the display to a mobile phone.

HP have of course chosen a different solution: emulating the whole calculator as an app, rather than just using the mobile as a screen display.

But would omitting the screen have been a sufficient power saving to use AA batteries?

(Apologies if this post is duplicated)

[eried]

The prime can run from normal batteries, but the lipo is a much better solution

[springer5]

Better during the lifespan of the battery that comes with it, then when that dies, literally useless due to having no battery at all (practically irreplacable).

A bit like a new car that comes with a full tank of fuel which the makers claim makes the car go faster and travel much further than ordinary petrol or diesel, and it's true it does. But what they don't tell you is that once that included tank of high performance fuel is empty you won't find anywhere selling you any more so you can only use the car for that one tank of fuel, after which you have to buy a whole new car just to fill the tank up again.

Meanwhile the cars that use ordinary petrol or diesel drive right past you on their way to the filling station while you're at the roadside negotiating the purchase of a whole new car just to get going again.

Was it worth that extra performance for one tank???

[StephenG1CMZ]

That is a great video Eried.

But the thought of doing all that to rescue a program from the Prime after the battery fails makes me rethink whether a calculator with an SD card and AA batteries might be more useful.

[ebswift]

Nice analysis, and from the comments it seems we can keep our calculators running for years to come as long as they physically hold together. These are exciting times, I think technology is about to take another turn soon and we won't be making last-ditch efforts to keep our Primes alive aside from keeping them as collectables after they finally start to run down.

If HP's own "The Machine" comes to fruition, I'd imagine their calculators among other things will drastically change. I have emulators etc., but it's hard to beat a dedicated tactile interface (and we can't use emulators for exams). Let's hope that now XCAS is HP's calculator platform we'll see our devices supported for some time yet regardless of what comes next in hardware. The Prime has so much more potential, I have high hopes for professionals (broadly speaking) singing its praises before long.

[springer5]

(03-02-1971 05:34 PM)ebswift Wrote:  Nice analysis, and from theOneline comments it seems we can keep our calculators running for years to come as long as they physically hold together. These are exciting times, I think technology is about to take another turn soon and we won't be making last-ditch efforts to keep our Primes alive aside from keeping them as collectables after they finally start to run down.

When the battery sold with your Prime dies. So effectively does your Prime. Once the battery dies your Prime is 'end of life' unless you can get hold of a DECENT Samsung s3 battery by then and even that won't go on too far into the future. Plus most of the 3rd party ones you'll get for that are rubbish and your Prime won't work anything like as well with them as it does with the original battery.
EFFECTIVELY. .. the Prime is a disposable calculator from the moment you buy it, as far as any official support from HP is concerned.

This does not excite me very much.

[ebswift]

Yeah, but as per the thread, the life of the unit is deemed potentially as a long time. Even though I'm a youngster by most standards, I have used older HP calcs through high school that were many years old even after they retired from their daily role in mining (can't remember the model, one of the old card reader ones with the moon lander game). I do understand that we expect that old-school reliability. But, we're in changing times, things aren't the same as they were, consumers are expecting incremental hardware performance upgrades over long-term reliability. My point was, once we hit computing power that we haven't dreamt of yet in consumer devices (which will be soon), these calcs will be nothing more than collector items. The Prime is already one of the first huge leaps in my eyes, but it's just a pioneer.

Hopefully OEM's will see a niche and continue to supply batteries for the Primes for a long time to come. I truly expect and hope that the Prime continues to be a reliable powerhouse, I bought it for that reason. I have just started mathematics study for this year and go fully into engineering study next year and I chose my tools carefully. I'm no new school leaver, I'm going in pretty late. I got the Prime to have a device to become familiar with and hopefully be at one with over the term of study. But I will change if there's another leap in tech that we have yet to see.

[StephenG1CMZ]

Ebswift, it depends what you mean by long time.
There have indeed been some suggestions that the Prime may last longer than a phone, despite both using mini-usb connectors.

The Prime's proprietary battery has been around since about 2013, and the Galaxy compatible battery maybe a couple of years before that (Someone may have the details).
The AA battery has been around since about 1947 (thanks, Wikipedia) - that's over 65 years.

So, which calculator would you bet would be capable of running your program in 2020 or 2100?

A Prime? A Samsung Galaxy phone? If hopes of niches attracting manufacturers to keep manufacturing batteries for old products have been successful?
Or something designed to work on AA batteries?

Of course, some won't be looking for a program to run that long - but then you have to rewrite the program. And just like with batteries, a Proprietary Prime Programming Language probably won't be as easy to find in the future as a more common and well-documented language.

That's not to say the Prime should have had AA batteries - as that may limit performance. But its a consideration which many in this thread have given more priority to than elsewhere.

By the way, many handheld radio transmitters ("walkie talkies") have their own proprietary batteries allowing operation at full power, but can also run at reduced power using an AA battery pack, allowing some continued use in the future. Perhaps the Prime or its successor could take either battery, with a choice of processor speed?

[debrouxl]

Well, AA is a comparatively large form factor, which would make the calculator much thicker, and therefore much less suitable to nowadays' marketplace
Even AAA, by far the most popular battery type for calculators (*), is being phased out from newer models (TI-Nspire CX, HP Prime, TI-84+CSE / 83PCE / 84+CE), replaced by Li-ion batteries with thinner form factor.

*: well, at least in TI calculators, which I'm more familiar with, but my 50g uses AAA as well, so its closest ancestors probably do. The HP-41 uses the even smaller R1 batteries, IIRC.

[Boris]

I was just googling about Prime batteries and stumbled on this.

My Prime's batteries are dead. I basically bought the Prime day one, and am a pretty casual user, using it occasionally at most - my old HPs are more often used as when I need them they're always ready to go.

I think the calculator is a great machine but it is effectively disposable after battery dies. Finding a decent replacement battery is a pain as others on the thread correctly guessed. Replacing the calculator entirely is also a risk, it may also have a dud battery.

Rechargeable AAAs or something standard would have really helped.

[luisphysics]

Ok so from reading this entire thread I fall in the category of charging my calculator on a 1-2 day basis. Therefore I need to have a plan to replace my battery when the time comes.

I wonder if I can put AAAA batteries like the one on my surface pen. I'll have to do the math to make sure I don't mess anything up.

[akmon]

You can carry a small powerbank, equivalent to 4 AAA battery´s room, as the mini USB port is a standard one. You have a market plenty of them, small, high capacity, colours, flavours etc. In case of an emergency, you are saved.

[Fortin]

(12-09-2015 12:15 AM)luisphysics Wrote:  I wonder if I can put AAAA batteries like the one on my surface pen. I'll have to do the math to make sure I don't mess anything up.

AAAA batteries were hard to find until I figured out that they hide them inside 9V batteries. ;-)