Comment by zachmu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zachmu | Hacker News Reader

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The Oasis is a great device with one fatal flaw: battery life. For some reason they nerfed the battery relative to the paperwhite so it lasts about a week instead of about a month. Probably won't bother a lot of people but it really bothered me. I read a lot and hate having to think about recharging.

I ended up with the Kobo Libra 2, which has all the same features as the Oasis but also has a month-long battery. I love it overall, great little device. Includes some quality of life features beyond the Oasis, including auto color tone shifting of the front-light in the evening (cool to warm), being able to adjust the light by swiping up the left side of the screen, and more options for progress indicators / headers and footers than the kindle has.

Kobo changes their lineup constantly, which means the Libra 2 has been replaced with a more expensive color version I haven't tried. Color on an e-ink screen is not an interesting feature to me, esp. not when it makes the device more expensive.

I haven't kept up with ereader stuff for many years since I worked on battery life models for kindles, but I will say that keeping your e-reader in airplane mode will increase the battery life significantly.

The reason is that WiFi has a DTIM which basically means that requires periodic wakeups to keep associated with the AP. This burns power.

I always keep the radios off, yes.

Even with the radios off, the Oasis struggles to get more than a week of life, it's kind of astounding how bad it is.

My suspicion is that the reason the battery is so abysmal is because you cannot turn off the backlight entirely. Indefencible design decision that just eats your battery. (older readers were better because they basically only used power to change the current page - now we made them so featureful they lost many of the advantages older models had)

On mine you definitely can make it so that there is no discernable backlight even in pitch darkness. Whether somehow it's still consuming energy I don't know. However I agree that generally the Oasis battery life leaves something to be desired.

> For some reason they nerfed the battery relative to the paperwhite so it lasts about a week instead of about a month.

I have a reMarkable 2. The battery lasts forever - if I manually turn it off when I'm done using it. If I don't do that, it will go into an inactive mode, with a bar informing me that it's shut off displayed over whatever was on screen when it went inactive - but in this mode, the battery still drains very quickly.

I can't understand why this should be the case. I know the device has recognized that I'm not using it, because it displays a message telling me so. Why is it remaining on, while pretending to be off, instead of shutting off?

This is the difference between walking away from the device for over a month and having it be mostly charged when I come back to it, or doing the same thing and having it be completely drained and require a lengthy charging period before I can use it at all.

On an E-ink screen, displaying static content uses literally zero electricity. Only updating what's on screen requires power. So, from your post, it's not immediately obvious to me why this inactive mode would cause battery drainage.

In this inactive mode, is anything on screen moving/changing? If not, have you actually noticed battery drainage, or were you making an assumption based on the fact the screen was "on".

No, nothing's changing on the screen.

>> This is the difference between walking away from the device for over a month and having it be mostly charged when I come back to it, or doing the same thing and having it be completely drained and require a lengthy charging period before I can use it at all.

There is a very noticeable difference in battery drain.

I found that airplane mode solved my oasis battery issues!

> Color on an e-ink screen is not an interesting feature to me, esp. not when it makes the device more expensive.

I have both the Libra 2 and Libra Colour, the issue isn't so much cost (in my opinion) as contrast. They should have introduced an upgraded Libra BW at the same time as the Libra Colour to account for that.

I recently got the colour one, installed koreader on it and there’s even a little button in the settings which drops you to a Linux shell on it.

Why would you want a shell on your e-reader? I don’t know, but it makes me smile ;) I can rsync books to it…

Will it run native Linux apps? My favorite tool for reading PDFs is Logseq, because I can use colors and it automatically pulls my highlights and notes into a page for the book, but this feature doesn't work on Android.

I've yet to find an eInk (or similar) Linux tablet where I can do this, but it would be a game changer for me.

Nah no way, there's no X or anything, the ui seems to be a load of lua.

Just put it in airplane mode, the battery lasts way longer. The way I read (with calibre to transfer books), means I rarely ever need the internet on the device.

Colour is probably for the comic crowd. They probably love it.

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