Eee Pad Transformer TF101 Honeycomb 3.2.1 Battery Drain Solution

Asus Android Tablet - Eee Pad Transformer TF101 is one of the best tablets available in market as of Oct 2011. Not only because of its reasonable price, but also because of its IPS LCD panel, and its smart keyboard/dock design. However, one of its drawbacks is the relatively short battery life without the extra battery inside the dock.

What makes the situation worse is after the recent upgrade to Honeycomb 3.2.1, the tablet started to drain much more power than it used to do, and that is regardless the dock being connected or not. I tried suggestions found online using Automateit or Auto airplane mode, but the system was still using a lot of power. It seemed that the system never went to sleep.

While I was suffering with this bug, I came across a "solution" accidentally and would like to share it with all affected users. By inserting a microSD card into the slot on the tablet itself, this problem went away! This can be easily verified when a dock is connected - the light next to charging connector blinks even when the tablet is supposed to be in sleep. After the insertion, the light stops blinking.

I hope Asus can solve this problem in their firmware soon so users who do not know this trick will be saved. However, till Asus fix the problem, this trick can help us use the tablet as it is intended to be.

P.S. My tablet and dock are B60 version, so I cannot say whether it will work on your hardware if it is a different version.

Update Nov 9, 2011
With the latest firmware update (Android is still 3.2.1), this battery drain issue has been fixed. No need to try the trick here anymore.

If you would like to improve the battery life further when the tablet is in sleep, use Auto Airplane mode app to set the tablet into airplane mode when the screen is off. The reason this extends battery life is that the system fetches information over the internet from time to time while it is in sleep mode, which consumes extra power. However, if you are using VoIP software and would like to receive incoming calls, you cannot and should not use this app.

When the tablet is docked, it seems that disabling the touch pad improves battery life further in sleep mode.

Receive voicemail and fax through internet for free in the US

Although we are living in an age of internet and text messages, occasionally we do need to be communicated with voice messages or faxes. For many people like me that do not have a landline phone at home, this can be difficult. In other situations, e.g., for privacy reason, we do not want to release our home phone number, it will be very convenient if we can receive voicemails and faxes through internet. In addition, it is much easier to keep an electronic copy of the fax than keeping the paper copy, not to mention redistribution is effortless with the electronic copy.

To my surprise, I came across this free service that provides a phone number in the US for us to receive voicemails and faxes. It is a real phone number, not an extension number! k7.net forwards voicemails and faxes to any email address that you specify. If you have control over your email accounts, you can also set up an alias that forwards incoming emails to multiple actual email addresses. If you are running a small business, you can set up an alias called fax@yourdomain and forward emails to all of your users. Sign up is very simple.

There are 2 limitations with this free service - (1) it assigns you a Washington State phone number, (2) it expires if there is no activity in 30 days.

One issue that you need to watch out is the format of the fax is TIFF that supports non-square pixels. Most fax machines send out images using these non-square pixels which makes the images look odd (wide and short). Gmail users can view (not the preview image when you read the email) these files online without any distortion and the default image viewer coming with Microsoft Windows can view them. I believe IrfanView also supports this format. As far as I can tell, for Linux users Okular and Evince can also display them correctly. Other OSes or viewers may have trouble with these images. The trick I use to assure compatibility is to convert the TIFF file to PDF using ImageMagick. This tool is included in almost every Linux distribution and can be installed on other OSes as well.

San Jose Airport

San Jose Airport (airport code SJC) is one of my favorite airports when I travel by air. It is clean and well decorated, with reasonable security crew that was more efficient and polite than some other bigger airports. A lot of passengers are on business trips, therefore you will not see many tired people with excessive luggage. The airport had going been through renovations for years, now it finally stops giving you the impression of walking through a construction zone. There is also free Wi-Fi access so you can stay online while waiting for the flight.

Another favorite of mine is John Wayne Airport in Orange County (airport code SNA). It is even smaller. The free Wi-Fi access is not as reliable as SJC, but you do not need to walk as long to get to the gates as with SJC.