Dealing with Power Issues

When it comes to high-tech deviceslaptop computers, portable DVD players, or even cell phonesone of the key questions consumers ask first is "What's the battery life like?" After all, what good is a combination television/DVD/computer/radio/telephone/camera/GPS satellite controller/garage-door opener/"spork" utensil if the low-battery light comes on after just 45 minutes of use? Fortunately, the Pearl doesn't suffer the malady of poor battery life, but it's still important to know a few details about it.

Charging Your Pearl

The Pearl is easy to satiate when it comes to power, because it comes with a USB cable that connects it to your computer. The connection to your computer serves two purposes:

• It allows you to exchange information with your PC.

• When your Pearl's connected to your PC (and the PC's power is on), the Pearl charges its battery.

The Pearl also comes with a travel charger (Figure 2.1), which is basically a small portable wall-outlet plug with a USB plug on the other end. When you connect your BlackBerry to this cable (and the wall outlet), it charges directly off the AC power in your home or business.

Figure 2.1. The Pearl's travel charger, unplugged

The last option for charging up your BlackBerry Pearl is a car charger. This device is not standard equipment in the Pearl's packaging, but for those who are on the road a great deal, a car charger is a good idea. The car charger works just like the travel charger, in that you plug it into your car's 12V DC cigarette-lighter outlet and let it charge up your Pearl.

Estimating Battery Life

The battery life of any device is usually listed in the specifications that the manufacturer distributes. Although some of those specs are very accurate, it can be tough to feel confident about battery-life times being reported by the manufacturer of the device. Indeed, it's roughly equivalent to accepting gas-mileage ratings from a salesperson who's trying to get you to buy a car.

In the case of the BlackBerry Pearl, RIM suggests that you can expect just over 2 weeks of standby time (15 days, to be exact) and about 3.5 hours of talk time. The Pearl's battery is a nonstandard lithium-ion rechargeable that fits inside the back cover of the device and isn't something that you can replace by dropping by the local 7-Eleven store.

I took the liberty of doing some highly unscientific tests to see what kind of performance I could squeeze out of the Pearl and its battery. These are the numbers I came up with:

• Talk time between 4.5 and 5 hours of active talk time.

• Standby time just over 1 week with 10 to 15 minutes of use every day; more than 2 weeks with little or no use.

• Music playback time about 15 hours (including screen use), with some fiddling with the controls.

• Video playback time not tested at length, but RIM suggests 6 hours. (I think that may be a tad optimistic.)

Standby is the time when the Pearl is turned on, ready to receive email, phone calls, or text messages, but not in active use. When the device is in active use, that's talk time, and when it's just sitting in a pocket or on a shelf, that's standby time. Obviously, a device that's in standby mode uses significantly less power than one that's being used actively. Standby time is very important, because you don't necessarily want to charge your device every single day if you use it for only a few minutes once or twice a day.

Understanding Power Drains

So now that you know how long you can expect the Pearl's battery pack to work, it might also be handy to know what activities suck the battery's juice more ferociously than others. Without a doubt, the most power-intensive activities (as with any device of this sort) are actively using the phone and doing anything that requires the main processor to work hard and the screen to be lit up. Therefore, using the Pearl to surf the Internet can be particularly demanding on the power supply.

Liquid-crystal display (LCD) screens in themselves don't use much power to present the image on the screen; what usually takes up most of the power is backlighting, which makes the image stand out in bright and crisp fashion.

When it comes to any computer, most of the heat is generated by the central processing unit (CPU); when heat is generated, you know that electricity is being used up in a hurry. The Pearl is no different. Its innards also contain a CPU, and when you are using it to have a game of Sudoku or BrickBreaker, you are not only challenging the battery by using the CPU, but also using the backlit screen constantly. Those two things combined are going to eat up power much faster than good old standby mode.

Maximizing Power

Now that you know what causes the biggest drain on your Pearl's power reserves, it's a good idea to think about what you can do to make a single charge last as long as possible.

The following sections list simple things you can do to keep your battery at its bestbut you should do them only if you are really trying to extend the life of your Pearl's battery. Part of the fun of the Pearl is its great set of features and abilities, so I don't recommend that you limit yourself unless you're specifically trying to make your battery charge last an extra-long time.

Limit Backlighting

To set backlighting options, choose Options > Screen/Keyboard. (You access the Options menu by pressing the Menu key and scrolling down to Options.) In the Screen/Keyboard submenu, you can set three key backlight properties:

• Backlight Brightness can be set at any of 10 levels from 10 to 100, with 100 being the brightest. By using the lowest comfortable backlight setting, you can save power, because the Pearl's backlight comes preset at the maximum setting (100).

• Backlight Timeout has 7 settings from 10 seconds to 2 minutes, representing the time that passes from the last time you touch a button on the Pearl to the time the screen backlight turns off. The lower the setting, the less time the backlight will be on throughout the day (or night).

• Automatic Backlight can be turned on or off. This option gives you more control of when the backlight is used, so you should be able to save a little more power over the long run.

Limit Feature Use

Although this isn't much fun, you can pare back on some of the cool features of the Pearl, such as the tones that sound when you press a button or key and the tones that the Pearl uses to get your attention. Creating sound takes more energy than not creating sound (although admittedly, the amount of energy you save from these limitations is likely to be negligible).

Limit Online Time

Limit things such as unnecessary Web surfing, reading spam email, and playing games just to kill a few minutes at a doctor's office. All these activities eat up battery power, so the less you use the Pearl actively, the longer the battery is going to hold up.