885T battery life

Yes, very odd. And quite ignorant of them to respond that way. I get 4-6 hours on a full charge on my 780 depending on screen brightness. How long have you had your 885T?

My 750 to exhibits similiar battery life (rated at 5 hrs). I used it once in Puerto Rico on a trip. Was disappointed that the batt. life was so short.

I guess that's why they put that "up to" in fron of the 5 hours in the spec sheet.

is less than 1 hr!!! I have not bother to talk to Garmin since I use my GPS on the car and have the power cable connected all the time, but...

Garmin advertises up to 3 hrs, so I gues 45 minutes fall under that category!

Otherwise, I like the 765T. I purchased the MSN Direct cable and lifetime maps!

"Yes, very odd. And quite ignorant of them to respond that way. I get 4-6 hours on a full charge on my 780 depending on screen brightness. How long have you had your 885T?"

Only about 3 months so the battery is pretty new. Yes, I thought is was a pretty odd answer myself.

I've had my 885T for about six weeks and I get about the same run time as you. I have come to the conclusion that the battery is only intended for backup and continuity of operation, much like a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) for a PC.

The 885T draws about 455ma with full brightness and about 235ma when the screen timeout dims the display. The battery capacity is only 1100mah. Mathematically, the battery should last just over 2 hours on full brightness and close to 4.7 hours at minimum brightness. However, the battery protection circuitry prevents the battery from fully discharging, limiting run times to about 1.25 and 4 hours, respectively.

So to respond to your comment, Garmin seems to have redefined 'battery life' from "how long you can operate the device from the battery while it is performing its intended function," to "how long the unit will retain data while performing minor tasks like finding your way back to your car, setting a route, changing settings, or keeping the unit running while external power is interrupted (as when starting the engine on certain cars)."

Another way of looking at this new definition of battery life is like a cell phone with (for example) 24 hrs standby, 2 hrs of talk time. The 885T has 4 hours of standby, less than 1 hour of 'operating' time at full brightness. Comparison charts don't list both numbers. Garmin chose standby time because run time alone would look terrible.

As displays get larger and brighter, processors get more powerful, (not to mention Bluetooth, FM transmitter, voice recognition and guidance,) and GPSr's get smaller, this may become a new standard to describe battery life until battery technology catches up with power demand.

Personally, I'm willing to keep the unit plugged in when in use in exchange for the rich feature set of the 885T.

Glad I decided to keep my nuvi 660. It is a work horse and the battery last about 7 hours.

I agree that it probably is similar to the cell phone range of battery life, I just wish they had been a little more up-front about what it meant.

One thing you've forgotten is, the memory of the new units is way up. That leaves less space for batteries. That's the compromise.

Memory doesn't necessarily equate to a reduction in space for batteries. I have an old SD card of 512 Mb that is exactly the same size as my 2 Gb card.

The problem with battery life is that the marketing types think that their customers want small stuff and want to give up versatility to get it. So they have pushed the engineers to design stuff with no excess space inside. Batteries are designed to fit into smaller and smaller spaces which limits their power capacity hence the unit's run time.

Jack j

PG,

What you're seeing in the difference between "advertised" and "actual" battery life is fairly typical. Keep in mind the manufacturer hasn't mislead the consumer. The promise, as you noted, was "up to" a certain amount of time.

Laptops, for example, are advertised the same way. I have a netbook that the manufacturer says can get "up to 7.5 hours" of battery life. In the real world it's five hours. The 7.5 is only realistic if you turn off wi-fi, turn the screen brightness to the minimum level and never do anything to crank up the hard drive. Ditto cell/wireless phones. Most have an 'up to' rating (you don't use them at all) but at least most also have a much lower 'talk' rating.

Anyway, GPS is much the same as a laptop. Cranking the screen up to full bright uses a lot more energy than turning it down low. Connecting with satellites probably uses more battery life than when disconnected. There may be other items that consume extra juice too.

Ultimately the consumer bears some responsibility too. If you never bothered to train your battery by fully charging before first use then allowing it to run down a few times before recharging (most of us don't bother) you've cheated yourself out of some time.

Cheers

Let apply the Garmin battery life to other products.

Say you bought a car that the manufacture said it would go up to 300 mph. So you buy it and the car actually will only go 15 mph. Not very good.

Say you buy a car and they tell you that is get 75 MPG. Well you drive it and it gets 10 MPG.

So you call them up and complain. Well the first car will do 300 mph if dropped from and airplane. And the second car will get 75 MPG when coasting down a hill.

Not very common use examples are they. I see Garmin's explanation no different.

I just think Garmin, or any other mfg. should not advertise up to 3 hrs battery life when the product barely can do one hour.

Garmin should use a real life example as an indicator for battery life not if everything is off...does that make sense????NO..they should set the brightness at 50% to 60% and have the system working a route as a person normally would and see how long it lasts....I don't think that would be to hard to do...I am sure they could come up with some real world settings to be tested.

Solid State memory, or HHD's are vastly different from an SD card. While I agree with your statement regarding batteries to some degree, the first point is not correct. If it were, gps' would be wafer-thin with 10 gigs of memory.

I might be wrong about this but I think you are talking about Hybrid Disk Drives. GPS units do not use disk drives of any type. All the data is stored in solid state memory, some of it is Flash some is just plain RAM.

As for a wafer-thin GPS, where would you put the extra stuff? Like displays, display power supplies, surface mounted IC's, two or more printed circuit boards, battery, mechanical components like switches and phone jacks, etc.

Jack j

No, I wasn't talking about Hybrid drives. But, I did have a typo...it should have been HDD which is an old school term for a hard drive, as opposed to a "soft', or RAM drive.

The main drive on a GPS is SS, current display info is mapped on RAM, but trip logs are stored in SS as with other data.

As to this, it would be much thinner than what we currently have as the MB could be spread out over a greater area in the case. I'd guess it would be 1/2 to 2/3 thinner if they could use SD type memory.