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Battery life of an Ipod Touch?


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Old 12-02-2010, 13:37
Tekkytyke
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Ive had an Ipod Touch for a couple of months now and have noticed that the battery life is nowhere near what Apple report it to be.
I have a 32gb 3rd gen and im supposed to get around 30 hours music.
I doubt i get a third of this.
How much life do you all get out of your battery?
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Old 12-02-2010, 16:03
PrinceGaz
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With a 8GB 2nd gen:

As little as four hours of using something like BBC iPlayer (because it uses most of the hardware- WiFi, CPU, video decoding, sound), or some intensive game with 3D graphics, the sort where you can feel the heat coming from the lower left corner of the device where the CPU is - a sure sign it is eating battery power. That's all with the screen brightness set quite low (less than 1/4 max) with auto adjust on in what is generally a quite dimly lit room (which makes the display even less bright). If the screen brightness were higher, battery life would be further shortened.

That's the worst case scenario though. I can generally get seven or so hours of "normal" usage, such as a bit of web browsing, a bit of reading news stories, a bit of document viewing, the odd undemanding game like Sudoku, and so on (with WiFi disabled except when I'm actively using it).

In extreme cases where it is quite literally "doing nothing" such as not having any app running (when I forgot to turn it off), or something totally undemanding like an alarm clock (I have my device set so the display never automatically turns off) I can get as much as about eleven or twelve hours before the battery finally runs out.

I think the 30 hours for music is a best case scenario where the display is off for pretty much the whole time and it is just playing through all the stored music at low volume into earphones.
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Old 14-02-2010, 19:57
Tekkytyke
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Thanks for the knowledge. I maybe ought to try reducing brightness etc and see what i get. I was just surprised i only got about 8 hours pure music.
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Old 14-02-2010, 20:20
Mystic Eddy
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If you're listening to lossless tracks, then that will reduce the battery life considerably. The 30 hours estimate is taken from playing tracks encoded at 128 and 256Kbps AAC (Wi-Fi turned on, auto brightness off). Any higher bit rate than that and playback time suffers.
http://www.apple.com/uk/ipodtouch/specs.html
(Read point 8 at the bottom of the page)
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Old 14-02-2010, 20:45
peace flaps
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the battery app i have says a full charge equals about 34 hours ipod and about 5 or 6 hours wifi/video. i'd say thats a true reflection of its performance (i too keep the brightness down, saves battery and also my eyes)
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Old 14-02-2010, 21:27
PrinceGaz
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If you're listening to lossless tracks, then that will reduce the battery life considerably. The 30 hours estimate is taken from playing tracks encoded at 128 and 256Kbps AAC (Wi-Fi turned on, auto brightness off). Any higher bit rate than that and playback time suffers.
http://www.apple.com/uk/ipodtouch/specs.html
(Read point 8 at the bottom of the page)
It doesn't actually say what will happen with different bitrates, or indeed different audio codecs. Lossless codecs tend to be fairly undemanding to run compared with lossy codecs, so that might compensate for having to drag more data from the flash-memory when playing compressed lossless audio.

At the other extreme, I prefer to have my music converted by iTunes to 64kbps AAC HE in order to get as much on in as little space as possible whilst retaining what I consider "acceptable" quality when out and about (at least as good as a cheap walkman back in the days of cassette tapes), but despite being a very small filesize, the complexity of the AAC HE codec may well mean it uses battery power faster than something like 128 or 256kbps standard AAC. I really don't know.

One thing for sure is that in order to get more than about twelve hours of use, the screen brightness will have to be very low for almost the whole time (which the iTouch will do by itself with default settings if you don't touch the screen and just leave it playing a long playlist).
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Old 15-02-2010, 01:27
Ovalteenie
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Also remember to turn off Wifi and Bluetooth if not needed as otherwise they draw battery power.
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