Round 5 - Battery Life

The Nook Color and Galaxy Tab both use a 3.7V, 4000mAh battery (that’s 14.8 Wh, for those keeping track). We could only run one of our two standard battery life tests, due to the lack of HD video playback on the Galaxy Tab. Our WiFi battery life test involves loading a number of pages until the battery dies:

WiFi Web Browsing Battery Life

We saw 8.75 hours out of the Galaxy Tab, and just under 6.5 hours out of the Nook Color. The WiFi edition Galaxy Tab pulled about an hour less than the 9.75 hours we saw out of the WiFi battery test on the last Galaxy Tab we tested, but given the number of tests we’ve run on the two devices, it looks like that’s just unit-to-unit variation; you should get anywhere between 8.5-10 hours of constant internet use out of the Galaxy Tab. 

The Nook Color fared rather poorly, especially given that on a hardware level it looks like it should be at least similar if not better than the Galaxy when it comes to power consumption. I think most of the difference comes down to variations in the rest of the component selection surrounding the SoC, with the display potentially being a culprit in reducing battery life. Barnes & Noble quotes 8 hours of battery life with the WiFi off for the Nook Color, so it matches up pretty well with our result. 
Round 4 - Cameras Conclusion
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  • TechnoButt - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link

    I'm rocking my Archos101 I got on ebay for $200. 10.1", 256mb ram, 8gb+sd card, Cortex CPU (?800mhz, maybe 1ghz, not sure).

    It's biggest grief is the viewing angles on the 10.1" display.. but come on, a capable tablet with 10.1" display @$300 new.. it should be in this article.

    It's not great for sharing, but who shares a tablet anyway. As long as you're the single user it's pretty darn nice.

    Yes, the transformer is better, but having two of these is better than one transformer. :)
  • TechnoButt - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link

    http://www.archos.com/products/ta/archos_101it/spe...

    1ghz A8
    256mb RAM (slightly underpowered.. really the weakest feature, but definitely liveable with a good build and app management).
    Power SGX 530
    802.11bgn
    10 hour movie playback battery life!

    And my favorite feature.. it is a USB Host (ie, you can plut a usb keyboard into it.. or storage device, in theory).
  • SunLord - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link

    I've got my nook color running CM7 at 1.2Ghz and it pulls a 2124 running quadrant standard and 14.597 MFLOPS in linpack
  • ET - Saturday, May 28, 2011 - link

    On page 3.
  • romanfoot - Saturday, May 28, 2011 - link

    http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm/453383121-Ain...
    I don't expect too much for the quality,but $200 for 8" 1280X800 and cortex A9 &512 ram and front & rear camera? Even though I've already got an Ipad,but still wanna just get one,cause it's such a bargain.Though,I don't have much faith on the screen and its quality and battery life,just put the link here,maybe it could help someone.
  • HenHowC - Saturday, May 28, 2011 - link


    Is the Nook Color screen 24-bit? I can't seem to find any information on this.
  • fromtablet1 - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link

    I really like my Aishuo A817 tablet (Currently writing from it) - It have a fast A8 1.2Ghz CPU, 512MB DDR, Weight about 460g, Android 2.3 (Market is working fine on it, Voice search is working, Flash 10.3, Latest youtube all is working fine) can surf the web using built-in wifi or external 3g using USB modem, NFS/Angrybirds/Asfalt/Raging Thunder are working fast, Battery life about 6 hours with wifi on, Can play H264/MPEG4-TS/AAC 2mbit/s IPTV streams just fine by VPlayer by WIFI or 3G. In other words I am happy with this 190USD tablet
  • Yowen - Tuesday, May 31, 2011 - link

    What I would love to see is GPS functionality compared for tablets. I personally would love to have a tablet that I can bring in my car to use as a GPS and media player. Without the need to connect to 3G. But that would possibly be filed under oddly specific, or no?
  • uberDoward - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link

    Rooted CM7 Nook Color @ 1.2Ghz for the wife, TF101-A1 for me :) Seems simple enough to me!

    Anand, I'd love a quick update, comparing performance of the Nook Color @ 1.2Ghz. All you need to do is flash Dalingrin's OC kernel. You can't really say that flashing CM7 is somehow any easier than doing another simple kernel flash for an extra 50% theoretical performance?

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