NW-HD5 Battery Life?

[theone]

Just got my NW-HD5 and lovin it so far. I hear the battery is suppose to last up 40 HOURS!! Sounds great, but so far i've used mine for about 4 hours and the battery indicator is at half way. I'm using 128 Kbps mp3s only on it, with the backlight set to 10 secs and volume at about 3/4 of the way usually (I've turned the EU restrict off). I'm also using the MDR-EX71SLB headphones.

What could be eating up the battery or could the battery indicator just be wrong?

Edited March 2, 2007 by theone

[peterjf]

The backlight is a major drain on the battery. I also think that extra power is used decoding any format other than ATRAC (but I do not know this for sure).

The other thing that runs the battery down quickly is repeatedly switching between tracks, as the player needs to access the disk more than it would otherwise do. If the player is just left to play tracks in its predetermined order (ie playing one album, then another and so on instead of repeatedly jumping about), the player caches 25 minutes of music at a time and therefore minimises the amount the disk is accessed.

All this shortens the battery life.

One final word is that I have had my HD5 since it was first released, which is nearly two years ago. Despite fairly heavy use most days, I still get about its stated 35 hours between charges.

[theone]

Ok, thanks for the reply.

Another question though, is it ok to charge the battery anytime or should I wait till it is depleted?

[Traksiris]

if you've read the manual, the 40 hours was based on actrac with 48kbps

[navsimpson]

Ok, thanks for the reply.

Another question though, is it ok to charge the battery anytime or should I wait till it is depleted?

Apparently, for a Li-Ion battery, charging it before it gets depleted is best.

Also, if the HD5 is anything like the HD3, the battery bar will go from full to 'one bar left' very quickly, but will last quite some time on that last bar. When all of my stuff was MP3s, the HD3 only lasted about 8 hours - so perhaps the HD5 will get 10?

-Nav

[theone]

Thanks for the help!

[Upliftor]

Just want to add, that navigating on tracks "eat" even more battery energy (for example, if I have a dj mix, that lasts 40 minutes, and want to jump on 18 minutes position), than just ordinary jumping between the tracks. Do you have the same?