iPod nano - short battery life?

[Taphil]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fish Tank X Has it ever occured to anyone else that this is probably a protection measure for the battery?

Not really, because it doesn't make much sense. If that were a real concern that an engineer actually wanted to address, it would be better solved by forcing the device to shut down or not function before the battery is completely drained, rather than making the battery meter inaccurate in order to give or force onto people a mindset to recharge; with this, the battery life should still be what is given as an estimate by the manufacturer.

Besides, I'm not relying on the battery meter, but in terms of real usage and keeping track of time.

 

[Pendergast]

I have a black 4gb nano, driving a brand new pair of er6i.

No scratches whatsoever so far.
Battery has lasted about 12 to 12.5 hours.
Music encoded AAC at 320 kbps, 48.000kHz. Some songs are as long as 45 minutes (In C, by Bang on a Can).

Very satisfied of my purchases. I am waiting for a pair of er4p that were faulty on delivery. So far, this ship is sailing very well.

 

[Taphil]

Well I finally got around to testing out my black and white nanos. Both have mostly mp3's at 192kbps LAME aps. Like I thought, the white one got 14.5 hours, and the black one 14.75 hours, both using Senn MX400 earbuds, volume at my normal listening level of ~33%. That's better than the 14 hours people were reporting with crappy AAC 128kbps, though I suspect AAC takes more processing power to decode than mp3, which was why I re-encoded my music library to LAME aps from Nero AAC 192kbps VBR.

The battery meter goes to 3/4 after an hour or two, but then goes down very slowly after that and lasts awhile when red is showing. It dies right about when the battery meter shows zero. However, I still think the backlight and some skipping around hurts battery life by a good amount.

 

[kloan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pendergast I have a black 4gb nano, driving a brand new pair of er6i. No scratches whatsoever so far. Battery has lasted about 12 to 12.5 hours. Music encoded AAC at 320 kbps, 48.000kHz. Some songs are as long as 45 minutes (In C, by Bang on a Can). Very satisfied of my purchases. I am waiting for a pair of er4p that were faulty on delivery. So far, this ship is sailing very well.

48,000?? since when can ipods play 48,000?? man all this time i've been ripping my cds at 44,000.... does it make a noticeable difference?

 

[pufftissue]

With normal use, the battery only lasts 8 hours. That's my story and I'm sticking to it :>

 

[adhoc]

Quote:

Originally Posted by kloan 48,000?? since when can ipods play 48,000?? man all this time i've been ripping my cds at 44,000.... does it make a noticeable difference?

it will make a noticeable difference... for the worse.

cds come in 44100hz. having mp3s at 48000hz implies sampling to a higher frequency rate, which not only is a waste of time for a lossy format, but also results in bigger filesizes.

 

[RedLeader]

but hey, if you use creatice soundcards, maybe you like the sound

 

[sonance]

If the songs came from a DVD source it makes sense to keep them at 48khz, which is the native sampling rate of DVD.
CD audio resampled to 48khz can only degrade the sound. If the resampling is very good, it may not be a noticable degradation but it is in no way an improvement for songs that came from a CD.

 

[Taphil]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Taphil Well I finally got around to testing out my black and white nanos. Both have mostly mp3's at 192kbps LAME aps. Like I thought, the white one got 14.5 hours, and the black one 14.75 hours, both using Senn MX400 earbuds, volume at my normal listening level of ~33%. That's better than the 14 hours people were reporting with crappy AAC 128kbps, though I suspect AAC takes more processing power to decode than mp3, which was why I re-encoded my music library to LAME aps from Nero AAC 192kbps VBR.

I had to bring back an old thread.

Almost four months later, my nano's battery life is getting unbearably shorter. It can't last more than 7 hours in real world use, as I use my nano about 1.5 hours a day and it only lasts 4 days in a week. So I did a battery test again, same exact test as before with the same exact songs and settings, and now it's only getting 12 hours instead of the 14.5 h. At this rate, in April when the nano is six months old, it looks like the battery will be 20% dead.

I'm starting to get upset, especially considering this is a flash player that's supposed to be efficient using flash memory instead of a hard drive.

 

[gshan]

Hi Taphil,

Do you always charge the nano through the Apple usb cable? I heard some people saying that the player gets a little warm when charging through usb as opposed to wallplug and this can contribute even further to degredation of the battery's capacity power.

In any case, I'm sort of wishing I had purchased my player from BestBuy with the long warranty now... Well Apple still has the $50 battery replacement I think, but I wonder how low the battery life must be before they accept it for this service.

-Shan

 

[Taphil]

I always recharge all my iPods using a wall adapter. My 4G color, 1G iPod, and 5G iPod still have great battery life. The nano's been a disappointment like the 3G iPod.

 

[nsjong]

Ok, I'm not even going to read all the posts before posting this.
So if this info HAS been posted, sorry for the double post or whatnot.



The early production of iPod Nanos... SOME DO HAVE BATTERY HOUR DEFECTS.

How do I know this you ask? Cause my friend got an iPod Nano the first day it came out from Future Shop. He had a problem similar to the stated problem of this thread.

A week later, Future Shop calls him and tells him that he should return to the store because it was a defect model AKA with the battery hour problems.

It seems that Apple had contacted Future Shop and told them some of the first ones released have problems and offered exchanges.


THE END.

I'm not sure how long his battery hour lasted but it's rare for the manufacturers to contact retail stores for exchanges.