iPod Touch battery
10th May 2008 – 12.40 pmMy iPod Touch's battery lasted me the whole of the four-day working week between recharges. Okay, so Friday is generally a half-day, but it's a lopsided half with a longer morning than afternoon, so I tend to get home only a couple of hours earlier than normal.
I hadn't intended to make the single charge last the week. I had the iPod charged at the end of the Bank Holiday Monday ready for the start of the week on Tuesday, and I generally recharge every other day. I don't recharge each evening mostly because I don't have a dock for the Touch in to which I can place it to recharge from any mains socket.
I didn't consider it worth buying a dock because I am still using my third generation iPod connected to my AV amplifier. This lets me play any music in my collection separate from the computer, so I don't need my iPod Touch to perform this function and I don't need my computer on should I want to play music. My iPod Touch is thus just a portable player, with extra functions, that I connect to the computer to charge when necessary. I also don't want to retire my third generation iPod because it has a random album playback mode, which is the predominant method of listening to my music, a feature that the Touch sadly lacks and I dearly would like to be included soon.
Because of D&D being moved to Wednesday this week instead of Thursday I found that I lacked time to charge the iPod on Wednesday evening, not wanting to keep my computer on unnecessarily for a few hours whilst I was out. I didn't think this would be a problem as my plans for Thursday night, when I would also be out, had been altered. However, the Thursday night outing ended up going ahead as planned and again I found I had no time to recharge before going out. I ended up with little option but using the Touch on a single charge for the week.
It lasted the whole week with some extra charge to spare. Admittedly, I was involved in a few periods of work where I couldn't listen to the iPod, but as I wasn't trying to prove that the iPod could last the whole week I was just happy at the end of the week for the charge those periods conserved. There is also a neat feature that is lacking in my older iPod in that the Touch brings up an alert when the battery charge is down to both 20% and 10%. Of course, the charge level of the battery is graphically displayed on the screen of both iPods, but there used to be a significant amount of playback available on the old iPod when the battery is shown to be empty.
One of the problems with the lower capacity of the old iPod was that I needed to make use of this extra time on occasion, and with increasing regularity as the battery aged considerably, but the only alert the iPod gave me about a low battery was when the battery could no longer power the unit at all. This was mostly a problem because when this flat battery alert occurred it effectively reset the iPod, losing its current place in the playlist. When playing a few thousand songs on random album playback that can take six weeks to complete it is a bit disappointing, for someone like me who would like to enjoy listening to all my music at least once, for the playlist to be reset half-way through.
The new alerts help to alleviate this problem, at least giving me more warning about the battery draining should I not notice the graphical display, which now shows a green battery to indicate a healthy charge and updates to become a red battery for low charge thanks to the colour screen. I still think it would have been preferable for the old iPod to have shut-down at a time where it could still hold it's position in the playlist, although there may have been technical reasons why this wasn't done. Even so, the superior charge capacity in the iPod Touch, as shown by it lasting so long this week, pretty much ensures that I am not likely to encounter this problem with the Touch. Now all I need is to be able to make use of that charge by being able to play all my albums in a random order.
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