Next iPod to have huge extension in battery life
According to this article, the next Portal player chipset will be much more efficient, giving the iPod a much better battery life. Apple of course could keep a shorter battery life but add a brighter screen or bluetooth. Or make ipods thinner. With the new extension, the iPod photo could potentially reach 45 hours/charge. pretty awesome.
Comments
Bluetooth headphones would be even better than longer battery life tho.
The only new features I'd like are gapless playback, and maybe support for Flac and other formats.
Surely this is possible without affecting the design too much.
500 charges, maybe more, maybe less and my iPod's useless? No thanks.
Originally posted by womblingfree
The only thing that'll ever get me to buy an iPod (well almost the only thing) is a replacable battery.
Surely this is possible without affecting the design too much.
500 charges, maybe more, maybe less and my iPod's useless? No thanks.
Don't believe the hype.
Although a replaceable battery should NOT be that hard to make, especially for Apple.
I say use the extra battery for umm...extra time. BT 2.0 headphones...sure. But anything else is a waste.
If it had a built in battery it would have been in the trash by 1935.
Bloody built in obsolescence.
See above link for PortalPlayers new chip for Flash Based MP3. The next Gen iPod Shuffle???
Just use better battery technology from the getgo. I'm not buying my portable gear based on some fear that the battery is going to die and I can't do anything about it nor am I going to allow a company to give me battery replacing capabilities so that they can stick in cheap shiza that I have to replace every 6 months like my damn cordless phone.
I usually have to charge it every two days.
So since it can handle 500 charges... that's about 1000 days with my current battery. That's about 2.74 years of battery life. It sounds like a lot to me.
When my iPod is 3 years old I intend to replace it anyway. So 500 charges is enough.
Originally posted by D.J. Adequate
The only new features I'd like are gapless playback, and maybe support for Flac and other formats.
I believe one of the iTunes updates allowed you to select a group of songs for gapless playback. It doesn't give you complete gapless playback & you have to set it up in iTunes then export to the iPod, but it's a start.
Originally posted by PBG4 Dude
I believe one of the iTunes updates allowed you to select a group of songs for gapless playback. It doesn't give you complete gapless playback & you have to set it up in iTunes then export to the iPod, but it's a start.
Really, it only gave you the option of importing CDs as one big freaking track. Which is not quite the same thing, and doesn't work for iTunes Store purchases.
Originally posted by tonton
A more efficient Portal Player chip would only have a significant effect on the battery life of a flash-based device like the Shuffle. With the HD based iPod you'd see 30 minutes' improvement at most.
Certainly the power budget for a HD is much higher than for something like this Portal Player chip, so the HD is going to dominate power consumption issues.
If the article isn't complete BS, however, it might mean that the new chip not only consumes less power in-and-of-itself than the old chip, but that it perhaps has HD power management features that help reduce the power consumed by the HD as well.
Could there be enough tweaking of HD power management left to do to boost playing times up to levels like 45 hours for an iPod photo? I'd have to say I'm skeptical, but I'd certainly be happy if it were true.
Originally posted by tonton
A more efficient Portal Player chip would only have a significant effect on the battery life of a flash-based device like the Shuffle. With the HD based iPod you'd see 30 minutes' improvement at most.
Evidently not.
New iPod mini uses 5022 chip
Originally posted by ericeason
That would be nice. I have to charge my 4G ipod every night or risk it dying halfway through the next day.
my 3G ipod has hit that shit-battery point where it dropped off considerably, but all i do is put it in the dock after my computer is asleep for the night, then when i wake up the computer in the morning it auto-syncs everything, and its full charged. i can easily go a day or two with my suffering ipod. i dont even think about the charge during the day. i'm not at all saying that you have to do things my way, but i figure if i'm asleep i might as well have all my computer things do something productive like charge.
Originally posted by tonton
A more efficient Portal Player chip would only have a significant effect on the battery life of a flash-based device like the Shuffle. With the HD based iPod you'd see 30 minutes' improvement at most.
1) the iPod shuffle doesn't use a PortalPlayer chipset, but a Sigmatel one
2) the PortalPlayer chipsets discussed here are hard disk-only; flash player ones are entirely different
3) how can the iPod mini 2G have 18 instead of 8 hours battery life if the weight and dimensions haven't changed and thus the battery itself cannot be a different one?
Originally posted by hmurchison
Nay on the replaceable batteries.
Just use better battery technology from the getgo. I'm not buying my portable gear based on some fear that the battery is going to die and I can't do anything about it nor am I going to allow a company to give me battery replacing capabilities so that they can stick in cheap shiza that I have to replace every 6 months like my damn cordless phone.
I have a Sony cybershot camera, Gameboy Advance SP, Cellphone and iBook. If the battery runs out while I'm out I can just pop in another until I can charge.
The iPod is just about the only consumer product that doesn't allow this. I've been using the same batery in these products for a long time now and the only loss of function that has been noticeable is in the cellphone.
Even if the iPod battery has a long charge time I still can't put in a fresh battery when it runs out, I must charge the whole unit. It's just stupid and such a retrograde step in consumer electronics.
Originally posted by Chucker
3) how can the iPod mini 2G have 18 instead of 8 hours battery life if the weight and dimensions haven't changed and thus the battery itself cannot be a different one?
Improvements to electronics, improved HD, improved battery tech. The battery has to be a similar weight, not the same battery.
Apple bean-counters designed the iPod's battery scheme, not the engineers. There are just so many advantages to having a removable battery pack and so few advantages to a non-replaceable pack, for the consumer, that no sensible engineer would opt for the built-in battery.
The only advantage of the current iPod battery design I can think of from the consumer perspective is that the purchase price may be a few dollars less, at the cost of decreased value, life expectancy, and operating time (w/multiple batteries).
Apple could sell lots of battery packs to replaceable battery iPod buyers, but would this offset the loss of sales due to an increased life expectancy of the iPods? Only if the competition was fierce, and even then Apple has a way of making non-competitive hardware.
Originally posted by monkeyastronaut
Regarding batteries... I have a 3G iPod. I use it everyday when I walk home from school, etc.
I usually have to charge it every two days.
So since it can handle 500 charges... that's about 1000 days with my current battery. That's about 2.74 years of battery life. It sounds like a lot to me.
When my iPod is 3 years old I intend to replace it anyway. So 500 charges is enough.
I still have my trusty old 1G 5GB iPod (first one to market, way before they came in 10GB as well), and I still get a good 6-8 hours of battery time out of it, depending on how many songs I skip. Depending on my mood, which varies from no-skipping to skip-every-second-song...
.:BoeManE:.