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Battery Life: The Digital Player’s Biggest Flaw
 CK Ng
Since the dawn of the digital era, battery life has always been a forefront issue. Having your personal digital player dying out on you while in the midst of enjoying a smooth evening of Frank Sinatra classics can be a pain-in-the-bum experience.
A Brief History about Battery
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away…err, I mean back in the late 80s and early 90s, digital devices were using either Nickel Metal Hydride (Ni-MH) Nickel Cadmium (Ni-Cd) before the introduction of Lithium Ion (Li-ion) batteries in 1991. What made Li-ion stand out from the other two aforementioned was that it does not suffer from memory effect, thus making multiple recharging while maintaining battery life possible. And the rest is, as they say, is history. Even till this day, the majority of portable digital devices are equipped with the usage of Li-ion, and although there has been a vast improvement in terms of stamina and new technologies such as Lithium Polymer batteries, there haven’t been any significant advances for a long time now.
 Lithium Ion
Li-ion batteries generally have about 500 recharge cycles, which is equivalent to 2 or 3 years (in mobile phone’s case, only 1 to 2 years due to more frequent recharging) of lifetime, after which the capacity will plummet until approximately 50 to 60 percent of the original battery life. Therefore, when buying a portable device, and in this case, digital players such as MP3/MP4 players, battery life should be a TOP priority among its features and should never be overlooked. Unlike mobile phones where the batteries are removable and easily replaceable, digital players often come equipped with built-in batteries, especially those hard disk-based players. Since people rarely change to new digital players as often as we do with mobile phones, buying something that can last you at least 2 to 3 years of usage is essential.
Flash vs. Hard Disk: Rabbit vs. Tortoise?
In terms of battery life, flash based players generally beat hard disk-based players flat. That is because unlike hard disks, which requires much more power to access its storage data, flash based players are small, compact, and are much faster in accessing its memory. Flash based players generally have a battery life of up to 35 to 40 hours on a single charge, or from a single AA/AAA battery. Hard disk-based players have a shorter battery life; generally 14 to 20 hours on a single charge. But they usually have much more storage space available compared to flash based players. As we are all too familiar with the race between the Rabbit and the Tortoise; flash based players are the Rabbits with lots of stamina but short of content, whereas hard disk-based players are the Tortoise that is slow and short in battery, but steady with tons of content. It’s up to where you want to place your bet on this race, and in this case, the rabbit may not lose to the tortoise after all.
What-You-See-is-Not-What-You’ll-Get
“The iPod says it has up to 14 hours of battery life, but why does the battery finish up much faster than that?” How often have you heard such comments from digital audio player owners? Sure, it’s not entirely impossible to obtain such usage times, but only if you live in the manufacturer’s ideal world. That is by listening to songs with 128Kbps bitrate, keeping volume levels at 50 to 60 percent, setting medium level of backlight contrast and having it automatically turned off within 5 to 10 seconds. Never tweaking with the preset equalizer, nor browsing the file folders, pictures or videos. And once you start listening, that you don’t touch any buttons until you turn it off. So, do the above instructions sound “easy” to follow?
Bottom Line
The state of your battery stamina pretty much relies on your personal usage, so don’t take the claimed battery life too seriously as manufacturers love to put “may vary depending on usage” in the tiniest of fonts. Use the guides wisely, and estimate it to be roughly ¾ of the actual time. In the next issue I’ll be conducting some personal endurance tests to see which players have the longest battery life.
 CK is hoping for a big price drop with MP3 players. Those who think otherwise can drop him a line at
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