Amazon, Linux and a Battery Breakthrough

The battery life on the device, which can store a couple of hundred books in digital form and access Amazon's store as well as newspapers and blogs, is also grabbing some attention. Open source developer Robert Love walks through some of the specs and tech details of Kindle, powered by Linux, that might ultimately grab more attention than whether Amazon can sell more books through this gadget:

Most notable is a power-saving infrastructure named , which provides device-level power management and aggressive system suspend functionality that is responsible for the device's excellent battery life. The architecture, which is based around an Intel PXA250 chip, is alternatingly labeled and in the source. The former is the codename for the Kindle as a whole (some amazon.com URLs leak the name). The latter, interestingly, is apparently an Amazon subsidiary that is "an innovative consumer-focused startup company" who "design[s] and develop[s] easy-to-use, highly integrated consumer products to serve Amazon customers" including the Kindle.

Amazon itself has this to say about Kindle's battery life: "Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging."

Are notebook manufacturers paying attention?

It's not a stretch to believe that the combined power of Amazon's design and Linux can produce battery life described as lasting up to 30 hours. Linux' father, Linus Torvalds, after all once worked for Transmeta -- the processor technology company that burst on to the scene a few years ago with the promise of ever-more efficient chips that leveraged smarter software.

Interesting note: the product hasn't shipped, but 281 reviews on Amazon's site itself are decidedly mixed on Kindle, and the product has an aggregate rating of two and a half stars.