How long should a new ipod battery last?

[gingerpaul]

Hi all, I have a quick question.

I have just joined the ipod revolution and got myself a 30gb ipod video. Nice bit of kit, except the battery lasts nowhere near the claimed 14 hours. It has been fully charged over night and has had 15gb of music freshly loaded on to it. I have been listening to whole albums without jumping around the tracks, which I understands uses more power. Despite this it managed only 9 hours. Is this normal for a brand new ipod, does it take a few charges to get up to maximum capacity or do I need to go and get it swapped at the shop i got it from?

Many thanks in advance!

[jimothy]

It will take a few charging cycles to get up to maximum, and you'll probably never get the maximum that the manufactures state. This is their lab max doing everything to up the life such as playing tracks that are all contigous on the disk, no backlight, low volume etc.

9 hours is not to bad. You should get it up to 11/12 hours of normal use after a few cycles.

[gingerpaul]

Ok, 11 or 12 hours I can cope with. Just seems to take the piss a little to claim one thing and then to only ever achieve 3/5 of the claimed usage. Hopefully it'll get better after a few cycles then.

[RobDickinson]

Been a lot of complaints over the 30g 5g ipods battery, havnt tested mine yet but I suspect I'd get 10hrs tops from it.

Depends on how often you trigger the backlight n stuff, the extra battery life/size makes the 60g more worthwhile I guess.

[robbieduncan]

It also depends on the bitrate of the files. Apple base their play time of 128kbs AAC. If you are using a higher bitrate it will have to spin up the disk more often and this will decrease battery life. The other thing to watch out for is low temperatures. The tests are done at room temperature. Low temps will cause a lower battery life.

[gingerpaul]

Back light is set to 2 seconds now and i typically encode to 192kbps mp3. Will probably use aac from now on if that's what itunes uses. I've been using it in the warm of the university library so I don't think temperature is an issue, although a good point. A problem li-ion batteries suffer from particularly I believe.

Anyway, I'll report back in a few days to let you know whether it's got any better.

[robbieduncan]

gingerpaul said:

i typically encode to 192kbps mp3

192kbs is approx 50% per file bigger again than 128kbs. An iPod as a certain amount of cache that it uses to keep the disk out of use. You are using it up 50% faster so the disk will be spinning much more and that is the major cause of battery drain on an iPod. I think that even at 192kbs you should get 11hours+ once it settles down a bit. AAC vs MP3 will not make a lot of difference to battery life but in theory a 192kbs AAC will sound much better than a 192kbs MP3.

[gingerpaul]

My only concern is the lack of compatibility with other software / hardware. I guess it isn't much of an issue now seeing as ipods have been around so long.

Slightly off topic, can anyone recommend a reasonable pair of headphones for these things? I've got a pair of Sennheiser "princess leia" headphones and the ipod sounds great through them. They're a little conspicuous though and I don't want to be mistaken for Craig David when I'm walking about. Are there any reasonably priced in ear headphones that you would suggest I looked at?

Cheers.

[rsvmilly]

Have a look at www.ilounge.com for definitive reviews on all things 'iPod'

[beanbag]

gingerpaul said:

My only concern is the lack of compatibility with other software / hardware. I guess it isn't much of an issue now seeing as ipods have been around so long. Slightly off topic, can anyone recommend a reasonable pair of headphones for these things? I've got a pair of Sennheiser "princess leia" headphones and the ipod sounds great through them. They're a little conspicuous though and I don't want to be mistaken for Craig David when I'm walking about. Are there any reasonably priced in ear headphones that you would suggest I looked at? Cheers.

Yo fool! I think the gingerness might give away the fact that you might not be craaaaig david. But if you want a decent set of earphones, go for a pair of Shure e2c, but seeing as your the cheapskate I know you are , go for a pair of Sony MDR-EX71SLW. They also white so they'll go with the iPod look plus they sit in your email and isolate all the outside noise and they sound pretty good too.

I have a pair and they're pretty damned good. (Not bad for 20 quid duty free)

[squirrelz]

beanbag said:

...... plus they sit in your email and isolate all the outside noise ..........

How's that work then