Battery life

[Worzel]

Can anyone confirm how many hours playback I should get out of the MP3 player from a full charge?

The battery on the player I bought my daughter for christmas seems to go from full to empty in just a couple of hours and doesn't charge at all when playing on a docking station like other MP3 players do.

This hasn't been a problem so far as we haven't been far from the house with it, so when it runs down we can charge it again on the computer - but if she was wanting to take it on holiday then it wouldn't make it into the second day and there would be no way of recharging it, which I don't think is great for such a device.

Is my player faulty and should I be getting more playback out of a full charge, or is it just the case that these MP3 players only have a couple of hours battery life?

[AFF]

Hi Worzel,

Could you tell us which model of mp4 player you have?

[Worzel]

This is the item description according to amazon, where I bought it from:

4GB MP4 PLAYER CROSS STYLE 4TH GENERATION MP3 PLAYER with FM RADIO and FULL COLOUR LCD SCREEN & 30 PIN IPOD DOCK CONNECTOR

[AFF]

Battery life should be between 2 and 4 hours depending on what bit rate the music tracks are that you have - higher bit rates run down the battery quicker.

192kbps is pretty much the average and should see you getting 3 hours before a charge is necessary.

If you are not getting three hours, there is a good chance that there is an invalid or corrupt file on the player - this often makes it look like the battery is running down too fast.

Many people make the mistake of allowing Windows Media Player to sync with the player and this puts a file called wmp.info on to the players memory - you would see this as soon as you connect it to your computer - it would appear in the players root directory. This is an invalid file type and causes the player to shut down prematurely.

[Worzel]

Three hours probably sounds about right for what we're getting out of it and I'm dissapointed to find out that it's actually correct and not a fault.

I wish I'd have known that before buying it. All in all it's a nice little player, but that is a terrible battery life for a portable device.

[AFF]

I think that is one of the reasons why its a quarter of the price of an ipod - the batteries in ipods are so much better

[Worzel]

Edited for straying away from subject. Thanks for your advice on my query