I've been puttzing around playing with my Freerunner over the weekend. Since my last post, I've installed an OS on the thing about 10 different times. I've tried the 2008.8 distro, as well as the Debian install. I picked up an 8 GB microSD card for Debian, though it took me a time or two to get it right. Lastly I tried the Qtopia distro. But, in all my efforts I stumbled across one HUGE problem for the FreeRunner. And that was a power problem.
On Saturday I was playing with TangoGPS on Debian. It was working fine. I had it plugged into the laptop for most the day, but there was a point where I had to run out for about an hour. I decided to let TangoGPS map my path. So I unplugged the Freerunner from the laptop, jumped in the car, and ran my errand. When I got back my screen was blank. I thought it was in power saver mode so plugged it into the laptop and tapped the screen. Nothing.
I saw this sort of issue with 2008.8 where the FreeRunner may not wakeup from just a screen tap. So I hit the power button to see if that would wake it up. (It's a multipurpose button, one press will not turn on/off the power. You need to press and hold for that). Still no luck. So I pressed and held the power button for close to a minute. This should have easily forced a reboot. No joy.
Next step then is to pop the battery. Then replace it and power up. This time I got a response. I saw the initial "OpenMoko Sunrise" graphic, then saw it start to boot into the kernel. I left it for a few minutes, only to find that it had shut down again.
The problem was a dead battery. My first real concern here is that the battery didn't even last an hour. But I considered this could have been my own fault. I *was* running GPS, WiFi, and BlueTooth services all at once. Not to mentioned I kept waking up the screen so I could see the GPS working. So maybe I overtaxed the power consumption. Kind of hard to tell without a battery meter though (The Debian install I did, with XFCE did not have a visible meter.) But now I had another problem.... How do I charge the battery?
You see, the FreeRunner must be booted up before the recharge circuit works. I read somewhere why this was the case, and it made technical sense. But I can't help but feel this problem needed to be dealt with differently. Afterall how many cellphones are out there? How many of them NEED to be turned on to charge? It's a known, and solved, problem.
So here I was with a battery that didn't have enough charge to boot up the Freerunner. But I needed to boot up the Freerunner so I could charge the battery. A nice catch 22. A quick search of Google suggests the only solution is to use another battery. Great. If I had one. But, then, how DO you charge the dead battery? The FreeRunner will not run without a battery in it - or so I read. But I think this is a software issue. (see below).
Well now I was stuck till the next day when I could track down another battery. Or was I... I took a look at the battery on my Samsung phone. Different shape, but the same power rating. The contacts were similar, if a little smaller. hmm... Now THIS is a hack if I ever saw one, but....
What I did was plug in my phone for charging, but with out the battery on it. Then I took the FreeRunner battery, and carefully positioned it at a 90 degree angle to the phone, so that the contacts on the battery more or less lined up with the contacts on the phone. I figured the worst that could happen was that I'd destroy a battery but I needed another one anyways... Now I held the battery in that position for a few minutes. In that time I checked the surface of the battery looking for any heat (indicating something bad was happening), but never saw any. Now I plugged the FreeRunner battery back into the FreeRunner, made sure the USB charging cable was attached, and then turned it on. Wouldn't you know it, but it booted up. A few minutes put enough charge in the battery so I could boot up and charge it right.
This is a MAJOR problem. If I'm on the road, this means I CANNOT use any of the useful features - like GPS or WiFi, unless I can plug it into the laptop (or the charging cable). This defeats the purpose of a MOBILE device. If I wanted to lug my laptop around with me, I'd just buy a GPS receiver for it. And I may not always have access to wall power.
Frustrating.
So, once things were powered up enough, I tried out the Qtopia distro on the phone. Immediately there was a night and day difference. I could actually SEE the battery monitor, and even the GSM signal strength monitor. All on a sexy interface. Sure there is no GPS yet, and nothing to make use of the accelerometers, but there was a graphical tool to set up WiFi, and even control Bluetooth. The dialing system worked much better as well.
I did read somewhere that the FreeRunner would shut down if you removed the batter, even while the charging cable was plugged in. I think I even saw this effect with the 2008.8 or Debian distribution. But as I was writing this up, I just proved that is NOT the case, at least not with the Qtopia distro. So this seems to be a software problem.
Now I've done some simple testing, and can see that battery life on the phone is not great. I think I *might* get 8 hours if I don't use GPS, Bluetooth, or WiFi. But at least I have a backup plan now to reboot the thing if/when the battery gets drained....