@OttoIt's the number of full charge cycles which matter on Lithium-Ion Polymer batteries. That is, if you use half the battery and charge it up again it's counted as half a cycle. You may as well use the battery without worrying about things like charge cycles. If you can plug it in while listening, do that. If the battery indicator seems off, recalibrate it. If the battery is old, you can get it replaced fairly inexpensively (and often you can replace it with a higher capacity battery).
It didn't seem confusing to me. Seeing as the article was talking about *using* the iPod while on the plane, I figured the advice about using the hold button was for when you were *listening* to it, so the screen wouldn't keep activating and deactivating because you were moving around while it was in your pocket. Placing it on hold while you're not using it is also good advice, since the screen and menus can toggle in either situation.amp300- There is no way to actually *force* the iPod to completely "turn off." The iPod decides when to actually power off on its own. By comparison, when you hold-down Play/Pause, all you do is force it to turn off the screen and backlight. While it may save you a few seconds of battery life compared to toggling hold and waiting for it to deactivate the screen on its own, it is *not* the same as powering off. You can tell that your iPod was completely turned off because it will display an Apple logo while it is booting up. If the screen immediately springs to life when you activate your iPod, and immediately displays your menu instead Apple logo, your iPod wasn't off, it was on the entire time, just with the screen and backlight turned off.
>How exactly does splitting long audio files (such as podcasts) into smaller ones conserve battery life as stated in this article?It doesn't. The article is mistaken, or rather, working on old information. The iPod's caching mechanism has changed a lot over the years, and it's currently about as good as it can get. Big files, small files, it makes no real difference in battery life. Lower bitrate files, now, that will improve battery life by a large amount, since it has to hit the drive to refresh the cache less often. Lower bitrate files will also be smaller than higher bitrate files, but it's not the filesize that matters, it's the bitrate.
What did you expect?I love it when trolls come here, attack a large group of people with inflammatory comments, then complain that they get modded down...
Creative uses 64k WMA files to inflate the number of tunes that can presumably fit on their players. Unlike Apple, they don't have any information about how they calculate the battery life. It's very possible that Creative also use 64k files to calculate the battery time. The only thing they say about it is that "the battery life may vary depending on usage". Sony is also using low bit-rate files to inflate their song count, and are equally tight-liped about how they calculate battery life.Apple seems to be the most transparent about batteries, maybe because of the over-hyped bitching about it.
@Otto:Well, that wasn't the case with my old mini.@TheSolomonwhat you're explaining is the case I am trying to get across. With my mini everytime I would pick up my iPod after a day or two, freshly charged and hold engaged, I would disengage hold, the menu would instantly come up, telling me it was sleeping the whole time, and my battery would last for an hour tops after that.Hold works great, when I'm acctually using the thing.
rspeedApr 25, 2006
@OttoIt's the number of full charge cycles which matter on Lithium-Ion Polymer batteries. That is, if you use half the battery and charge it up again it's counted as half a cycle. You may as well use the battery without worrying about things like charge cycles. If you can plug it in while listening, do that. If the battery indicator seems off, recalibrate it. If the battery is old, you can get it replaced fairly inexpensively (and often you can replace it with a higher capacity battery).
thesolomonApr 25, 2006
It didn't seem confusing to me. Seeing as the article was talking about *using* the iPod while on the plane, I figured the advice about using the hold button was for when you were *listening* to it, so the screen wouldn't keep activating and deactivating because you were moving around while it was in your pocket. Placing it on hold while you're not using it is also good advice, since the screen and menus can toggle in either situation.amp300- There is no way to actually *force* the iPod to completely "turn off." The iPod decides when to actually power off on its own. By comparison, when you hold-down Play/Pause, all you do is force it to turn off the screen and backlight. While it may save you a few seconds of battery life compared to toggling hold and waiting for it to deactivate the screen on its own, it is *not* the same as powering off. You can tell that your iPod was completely turned off because it will display an Apple logo while it is booting up. If the screen immediately springs to life when you activate your iPod, and immediately displays your menu instead Apple logo, your iPod wasn't off, it was on the entire time, just with the screen and backlight turned off.
ottoApr 25, 2006
>How exactly does splitting long audio files (such as podcasts) into smaller ones conserve battery life as stated in this article?It doesn't. The article is mistaken, or rather, working on old information. The iPod's caching mechanism has changed a lot over the years, and it's currently about as good as it can get. Big files, small files, it makes no real difference in battery life. Lower bitrate files, now, that will improve battery life by a large amount, since it has to hit the drive to refresh the cache less often. Lower bitrate files will also be smaller than higher bitrate files, but it's not the filesize that matters, it's the bitrate.
cashApr 25, 2006
2 things not mention. Constant bitrate uses less battery than VBR, and also non DRM files use a lot less power than DRM'ed ones do.
vtwinApr 25, 2006
What did you expect?I love it when trolls come here, attack a large group of people with inflammatory comments, then complain that they get modded down...
vtwinApr 25, 2006
Creative uses 64k WMA files to inflate the number of tunes that can presumably fit on their players. Unlike Apple, they don't have any information about how they calculate the battery life. It's very possible that Creative also use 64k files to calculate the battery time. The only thing they say about it is that "the battery life may vary depending on usage". Sony is also using low bit-rate files to inflate their song count, and are equally tight-liped about how they calculate battery life.Apple seems to be the most transparent about batteries, maybe because of the over-hyped bitching about it.
tehnicoApr 26, 2006
@Otto:Well, that wasn't the case with my old mini.@TheSolomonwhat you're explaining is the case I am trying to get across. With my mini everytime I would pick up my iPod after a day or two, freshly charged and hold engaged, I would disengage hold, the menu would instantly come up, telling me it was sleeping the whole time, and my battery would last for an hour tops after that.Hold works great, when I'm acctually using the thing.