when your battery runs out - do you lose your data and have to reinstall everything?!

The main external battery has to be at at least 30% to use the backlight. It has to be at at least 20% for the radios to stay on. It has to be at 10% to turn on at all. Once it gets to 29%, the light won't turn on. At 19, the radios shut off and your calls go to voicemail. At 9, it shuts off and only keeps the memory hot.

There is also a second polymer internal battery that keeps the memory hot during battery swaps and for the last 20 minutes. If you exhaust this, prior devices would hard reset. Because the i730 is wm5-ready, it has a large ROM and leaves 86 MB free in it, allocated as the SafeStore. If you install all your apps into that 86 mb, then when you lose power, you don't lose any of your apps. Anything you put in SafeStore will be kept across hard resets and total power losses. The i700 had 6mb of SafeStore, so I'd put only a handful of critical docs there. Now it makes total sense to keep RAM open for running programs only and install all apps into SafeStore.

It can be confusing to think of the RAM as long-term storage, but that's what it is. When you see a document that is not on your storage card or SafeStore, if you hard reset or lose power, that document is gone if you haven't backed your RAM up to your storage card with Sprite Backup.

This situation has made many of us faithful users of Sprite Backup. I run a scheduled backup every morning on my i700. I also charge my i700 nightly without fail. Clamshells can last days, but these devices are a long way from getting even a day and a half out of an extended battery.

Prepare to be slave to your charging cable and backup software, but keep in mind you can't do 1% of the stuff you can do with an i730 with a clamshell.

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-s