Back

Oh, man, so I’ll be writing a proper review of the new #StarLite #Linux #tablet but initial thoughts…

Emotional brain: I love this thing! The screen alone is amazing. Just gorgeous! 2,880×1,920 @ 200% is perfect. Feels amazing in your hand in portrait orientation.

Rational brain: Has basic usability issues.

• Can’t use encrypted drive without external keyboard
• GNOME on-screen keyboard unusable
• Front camera is crap
• Back camera not recognised (?)

But amazing this even exists… more soon.

Another observation, having charged it to capacity twice now and let it discharge fully once:

The battery only charges up to 96% and dies at 2%.

Not the worst possible thing but I would expect a new device to charge to 100% and die at 1%. The former likely more important than the latter.

Hope the battery doesn’t have the same journey that the one on my StarLabs Mk IV did – it dies at around 65% or so after two years.

So I spoke to the StarLabs folks and the 96% max charge is apparently by design to protect the battery.

@aral That is horrible UX. The whole definition of `100%` is to be the point to which the charger goes. There is no native "100%" in the battery to measure, it's purely UX.

The "dies at 2%" is more excusable, but still not user friendly. It's why phones won't let you use the flashlight at less than 5% - drawing too much current drops the voltage below the cutoff and the battery conks out, so you need to prevent the current from going up much at all when it's very low. It probably represents "our charge counter indicates 2% left, so if you so much as turn on the camera it's gonna die".

@dascandy I’m assuming it’s because they don’t have control over that with the OS (unlike Apple, etc., who have control over the hardware and the software). They could, of course, if they customised an OS and optimised it (perhaps as the official distribution where everything works the best it can… ah, if only there were more hours in the day, it’s something I’d love to work on…)

@aral The numbers come from ACPI though (assuming x86?) and ACPI usually defines functions in its bytecode that do the "hide the bottom and top end of battery" for you.