With the GamePad, ARCHOS made one of the first great Android portable console. During our product review on a pre-production model a few weeks ago, we regretted the short battery life. Since then, we have been doing some extra measurements to report the battery performance on a retail version of the GamePad in different usage scenarii.

ARCHOS GamePad battery

According to hailrazer member in our forum, who did some surgery on his GamePad, the following specs (3.7V, 11.1Wh) are printed on the Lithium Polymer (LiPo) battery. This represents a 3000mAh capacity, but it seems to deliver really less in reality.

With the supplied 2A charger, it takes about 2 hours and half to get the tablet battery fully charged.

Battery life test methodology

From a fully charged tablet, we let a test scenario loop until the tablet battery gets empty.

Unless mentioned otherwise, our battery life measurements were done under the following test conditions:
- using latest firmware from 2012/12/27 on a retail device (Android build signature:

)
- tablet was started after a fresh reboot
- tablet fully charged (lockscreen says “Charged”, Settings / About tablet / Status says Battery level100%)
- media sound volume set to 50% (Settings/Sound/Volume, set Media bar to middle position)
- brightness set to half (Settings/Display/Brightness)
- WiFI disabled
- each battery test has been run at least 2 times

In each test, the battery level is monitored using our ArcTools application.

Video test

This first test deals with playing this video file big_buck_bunny_720p_AAC.mp4 (Big Buck Bunny 720p, stereo sound in AAC format) in loop until the tablet battery gets empty. We have done 2 extra tests measuring the battery life with display brightness set at minimum and maximum values.

The battery measured were the following:
- brightness at 50%: ~5 hours (~18 000 seconds)
- full brightness: ~3 hours 20 minutes (~12 000 seconds)
- minimum brightness: ~6 hours and 10 minutes (~22 000 seconds)

Here is…