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Comment by ncann | Hacker News Reader

One thing that people tend to not expect for these e-ink smartphones is that their battery life, while good compared to normal phones, is nowhere near the "expected" battery life for an e-ink e-reader. This phone for example has a battery that lasts ~3-4 days, while a normal e-reader can last weeks.

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That's an interesting point. Is this because of the modem and always-on background tasks / push notifications?

Yes. A dedicated eink reader usually goes into full suspend-to-RAM mode, between each page refresh.

Also, e-ink displays consume power when they update. It takes a lot of energy to change the state of the pigment cells, and no power when static. So the always updating, graphically busy interface of an Android phone (even if themed for eink) is much more power-demanding to render.

Yes, in the end these are (mostly) fully fledged android devices with all the baggage running in the background. Modem aside, wifi is usually the biggest battery consumer, keeping wifi off usually will significantly improve the battery life (which is true even for normal phones, but especially so for these e-ink phones).

Android is probably a big part of the problem here as the eInk phone manufacturer doesn't have the ability to refactor Android for ultra low power usage.

Even so, getting it to shut down as much as eReader would probably be very hard if it needs to be able to receive incoming phone calls.

NetGuard at f-droid would double my battery expectancy on an old Samsung A6 by blocking most connections

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