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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.

@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.

@dascandy Interesting. If you’d like to give them any pointers, they have a leave us a message thingy at https://ie.starlabs.systems and they’re usually rather responsive. I’m sure they’d be happy for any tips on how to improve the experience :)

@jeremy_list @aral

Sure. The thing is, a battery has a curve where you do not want to be fully at either end. Charging to 4.4V is going to wreck the cells, discharging to 2.5V is going to wreck the cells. Equivalently for a charge counter, 0 is going to kill the battery, as will the 100%-equivalent count. So your battery charge indicator is going to map a subsection of this to 0-100%, and depending on how long they want the battery to last that range can be larger or shorter. Advertising tends to make companies put in a larger range at the expense of lifetime, while smart users will want to restrict charging up to X% (like 50% or 80%) to ensure they don't destroy the cells by keeping them charged.

50% is a good value for keeping charged (say, a laptop on permanent power), and 80%-90% is a good value for things where you actually use the battery. But keep in mind that the bottom end is just as important - if you don't charge to above 80% then don't discharge to below 20% either.

@dascandy @jeremy_list @aral I know very little about the physics of batteries, but hear things like this often (though in less detail, thanks for the info!) Is there a solution for this we haven’t been able to find or implement, or does physics just say “No”? The lay-person in me just finds it very weird that a battery, whose entire job is holding charge, gets wrecked by either holding or not holding charge.

@dzwiedziu Well, yes, we all know it’s a dark art – just saying that if someone sees their fully-charged battery at 96%, they’re going think something is wrong whereas if they see it at 100% they’re going to think everything’s all right :) It’s more about communicating well ;)

@aral Right, should have mentioned that. As you can always show 100% and 1% when it's “in reality” 96% and 2% with a note attached in the details.