Battery Life on pmps

[clonmult]

I've had a 4gig creative Zen Microphoto for a few months now, and a couple of things are starting to irritate me.

1. Screen, now has a stupid green line going down it, but thats not a show stopper.
2. Sound quality. no Bass. As a result, I'll mainly use it for Audiobooks.
3. And this is the show stopper. Battery life. It sucks. I'm getting less than 6 hours total playback time, which is fairly pathetic. Sure, i can get one of the 8gig higher capacity batteries, but it won't add much on.

So I'm wondering about which players out there with a decent amount of storage actually have a reasonable battery life.

I was considering the iPod Nano, but a friend has one, and she reckons that neither hers or her other halfs nanos actually last more than 4 hours on a charge.

So, are the latest Nanos much better in real world usage? The Sony NWA1200 is claimed at having 20 hours battery life, and I've had good experiences with my NetMD player (50 hours playback).

Suggestions? I figure I don't need a huge amount of storage, maybe 8gig minimum, but decent battery life is useful.

 

[fizl]

Try something solid state like the Samsungs rather than a hard drive style MP3 player. Your battery life should improve exponentially!

Shaz

 

[clonmult]

Thats what I would have thought, but the old Sony NWHD3 (?) could get 30 hours, and that was a 20gig hd unit.

 

[Uridium]

Used to get about 20 hrs regularly out of my HD3, now get a genuine 12 hours out of my Nokia N91 (also HD based)

My wife has a little 1gb sony flash player (NWE-105 i think) that uses a AAA battery and she regularly gets 20hrs out of even those nasty cheapo batteries.

I think a lot of it boils down to how lazy the manafacturer is a lot of the time. Generally the sony players are all very good for battery life

 

[clonmult]

12 hours out of an N91? Thats better than I expected.

 

[eyeballKid]

Sonys still seem to be the kings of battery life - the Sony NWA3000 will give you 24 hours playback at 132kbps (their quoted maximum is 35hrs at 64kbps), think the new iPods are also now approaching those kind of figures. You do have to watch the manufacturers' claims though - at realistic bitrates you will burn batteries faster.

 

[clonmult]

Whilst I'd tend to agree about manufacturers quoted battery life, at least with the Sony kit, they do tend to be realistic. My MZN510 Net MD easily equals the claimed battery life (50 hours or so).

Was asking an old friend what life she gets out of her first gen Nano, and she reckons that bother hers and her other halfs units only go for about 4 hours.

Been trawling e-bay, and there are a few ND-HD3, NW-HD5 and NWA3000s floating around, so may see what turns up after christmas.

And should find out what the battery life is like on the next gen Nanos - the missus wants one for christmas ....

 

[james.miller]

i get about 15 hours out of my istation i2 30gb playing videos. Roughly the same playing audio, but thats because they abandond the firmware before it was finished. My iriver h10 currently manages about 4 hours (audio only) but thats because im running the rockbox firemware on the play, which whilst sounding excellent with parametric eq's and such, is still in its infancy. That's compared to around 8-10 hours on the standard firmware.