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#41
Hmm. It's hard to believe that the power consumption of the touch layer would be particularly significant on a device that is likely to have a large, bright screen and a monster of a processor. Care to source?
 
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#42
Originally Posted by gerbick View Post
I'm just wondering why would it mean a drop in battery though?
Not necessarily a significant one, but the capacitive touchscreen require both a separate controller (which consumes power) and power for the screen itself.
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#43
Originally Posted by gerbick View Post
But how much? I mean, all it has to do is notice that it's being utilized by two inputs and not one.

For what it's worth, I'm going by my kiosk background and it's not that much of a difference if any at all if you detect one or two (or multiple) inputs. You just have to code for that.
What people are talking about is the power consumption of the capacitive touchscreen itself, and not the CPU time spent interpreting the positions.

Although I'm not familiar with the capacitive touchscreen power consumption, I'm pretty sure that the screen backlight must use much more than that.

Either way, resistive should be less taxing on the battery.

I've played around with the iPhone 3GS and although I don't like Apple (due to all the constraints they imply) I must admit their interface (software and hardware, including the capacitive touchscreen) works VERY well. No delay at all when scrolling webpages or menus.

But, I want a decent phone running an open OS, be it Android (preferably) or the Maemo (I didn't know Maemo until someone sent me and N900 link).

The N900 is (today) what comes closer to what I want. I'm just a bit reluctant about how is it in real life. Some videos show some stuttering when scrolling or playing games. Also not really sure how they implemented the "1GB application memory" as the hardware only has 256MB of RAM. If they are using flash memory for that it would be slow and would probably kill the Flash Memory due to multiple rewrites.

Multi-touch is not a required feature, but it's usability is great for zooming or rotating objects. I didn't like the gesture they are using on the N900 to zoom in or out on the browser. Also don't know how easy it would be for me (or other community developers) to implement a different gesture.

Hmm, I went off-topic here. sorry!
 
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#44
But I want a source of how much of a difference this makes. I mean, there has to be a source other than opinion.
 
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#45
Originally Posted by NicolasF View Post
Also not really sure how they implemented the "1GB application memory" as the hardware only has 256MB of RAM. If they are using flash memory for that it would be slow and would probably kill the Flash Memory due to multiple rewrites.
Flash technology has advanced considerably in the last 10 years. With the size of the internal card in the N900 it would likely take several years (if not decades) of 24/7 writing to kill it by wearing it out.
 

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#46
Question... wouldn't X also need multi pointer support for multi touch support? That'd require X Server 1.7, which will be in X.Org 7.5. How does Palm Pre have multi touch?
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#47
AFAIK the Pre does not use X, it's straight webkit-on-framebuffer operation (=they did their own stuff wrt multitouch).
 

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#48
Originally Posted by attila77 View Post
Flash technology has advanced considerably in the last 10 years. With the size of the internal card in the N900 it would likely take several years (if not decades) of 24/7 writing to kill it by wearing it out.
Hmm, I know they have advanced, but I'm still not confident about durability/reliability.

I guess I'm somewhat conservative on this.

Take a look at this article: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article...090528/170920/

NAND Flash memory quality is also beginning to drop. Chips manufactured using 90nm-generation technology in 2004-05, for example, were assured for about 100,000 rewrites and data retention of about a decade. As multi-level architecture and smaller geometry are introduced, quality is showing a sharp decline. The 30nm 2-bit/cell chips expected to enter volume production in 2009-10 may well end up with a rewrite assurance of no more than 3,000 cycles, and a data retention time of about a year. The first 3-bit/cell chips are hitting the market now, with only a few hundred rewrites.
100,000 rewrites is not much in my opinion.

Supposing a perfect write distribution algorithm, we would have 32*10^9 bytes * 100,000 rewrites = 32*10^14 rewrites.

Considering a 10MB/s constant rewrite speed (which BTW would kill performance used as RAM), that would give about 10 years in durability if used under load 24/7. That's obviously a lot but we don't know the exact figures for the SSD used in the N900 and we don't know how efficient is the algorithm (specially if the SSD has less empty space).

Wish the N900 had 512MB (true) RAM .

Answering "allnameswereout", yes I believe the new X server is needed for multi-touch.
 
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#49
Just to make a correction: apparently the N900 used eMMC memory. It seems it is a high-performance part:

High speed: up to 52 MB/s
http://www.micron.com/products/nand/managed-nand/index

Can't find anything about realiability though.

I think it won't be a problem in under 3 years of heavy usage, but still makes me a little bit worried .

Sorry for going off-topic.
 
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#50
Originally Posted by NicolasF View Post
Hmm, I know they have advanced, but I'm still not confident about durability/reliability.
I've had swap turned on on my N800 since 2007, I haven't had any cards die. Nor have I heard of any 2GB eMMCs in the N810 dying as a result of that, either.

This issue has been beaten to death in the past, so far nobody has really managed to kill any cards.


Originally Posted by NicolasF View Post
Considering a 10MB/s constant rewrite speed (which BTW would kill performance used as RAM), that would give about 10 years in durability if used under load 24/7. That's obviously a lot but we don't know the exact figures for the SSD used in the N900 and we don't know how efficient is the algorithm (specially if the SSD has less empty space).
It's not an SSD, it's an eMMC.
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