Battery life not what I expected...

[sanyue]

Recently, I got myself a 8gb Cowon j3. It's pretty awesome.

There's only one thing I'm not too crazy about:

The battery life.

The manufacturer claims you can get up to 64 hours of battery life, and even with all the bragging I've heard, I still didn't even expect that. If I got somewhere between 30-35 hours, I was cool.

But I'm not even getting that, I'm not getting anything near that.

At work, on a full charge, it died about 5 hours into my shift :/

I charged it again overnight and decided to test it today. I set it to play all my music at random, the display at always on and at brightness 1 (because I HATE having to press the button to activate the screen every so often), and volume 15.

This time I got about 6 hours and 15 minutes out of it before it died.

Is this a common problem? Is it a defective battery? Or is this normal behavior for the battery with such usage?

If it's that last one, I might have to return this thing if possible. I've gotten much better battery life out of my older players (Zune 30 and Zune 120) and even my dinky little GoGear Vibe gives me better battery life...

[CrowdAds]

[Marvin the Martian]

The display always on, even at minimum brightness, will eat a lot of charge.

[steinburger1109]

You used your Zunes and GoGear with the display on and got better battery life?

[sanyue]

Originally Posted by steinburger1109

You used your Zunes and GoGear with the display on and got better battery life?

No, not with the display on all the time because it wasn't necessary to keep the display on all the time on them.

See, on the j3 it feels like I have to press and extra button to activate the screen. Like, if the screen is out and I wanna hit next on the touch screen, I have to press the power button first and then hit next.

On my GoGear, if the screen is out I can press ANY button to activate the screen. So if I wanna go to the next track, I can just hit next twice.

I'm pretty sure my zunes did the same thing (I can't test it, both are no longer with me *sadface*) because I never felt like I was doing something weird or unnatural as I do with the j3 lol

Unless I'm missing something about the j3? Is there anyway I can have it do what I'm used to without completely devouring the battery life?

[steinburger1109]

Ah, ok, I understand now. Yea, with touchscreens you'll have to activate the screen before using it or you'll have to leave it on. So pretty much either you'll have to take that one little extra button press or you'll sacrifice large amounts of battery.

[dduckquack]

why not just use the tactile next, previous and pause buttons and leave the screen off?

[jimdoc]

I was also confused when I first got my J3 regarding the '64hrs battery life' as I was getting waaaay less than this. I then read somewhere that this Cowon test figure is reached by continuous play of standard mp3 files[probably 128bps]with no sound enhancements, low volume, screen off etc. So I tried to replicate this just to test it and guess what? I got almost exactly 64hrs!
Therefore once you start using your own settings and play around with all the different sound options, use the screen etc then you will obviously get less. My advice to make battery last that bit longer is to queue up your playlist/albums and just mostly let it play without going in and out of settings too much, having volume at usually 20-ish at the most, keep screen brightness at 4 or 5 unless you really need to go brighter. By doing all this I probably get around 30 to 40hrs on average which is still pretty good.
As for leaving screen on permanently[even on low]this will obviously affect battery life. As someone else suggests you can easily change tracks with the tactile buttons on the side. Hope this helps

[bloosky]

The J3 has a battery life for video for 11 hours.. which means it can last for about 11 hours with the screen constantly on. I think the brightness at 1 is too bright, it sucks that the screen takes away so much battery life. 64 hours under non-ideal conditions is a HUGE exaggeration.

:edit: 09.26.11
alright.. so i felt like my j3 was lagging for some reason so i tried the panasonic SD formatter someone posted either here or iaudiophile.
i left the screen on for about two hours, normally batt goes down by 1 bar at this point,
but after the format, batt is still at 100%! i guess all it needed was some cleaning up to do :P
btw, firmware is 2.26.