My new 950 gets charged each day. The battery icon shows all bars full.
After less than two hours of reading, the battery bars are down by one.
After 4-6 hours, there's one bar showing.
Is this normal?
Do I have a defective battery?
BestBuy says I've until the end of January to return it.
Others' battery use experience?
Thanks

Do you have wifi/3G on? Are you reading ePub files or PDF files? PDF uses more battery as far as I know and also things like images effect that too. If you are using a memory card it uses more an if the card is really full or a larger card.

Wifi and 3G are both off. Rarely in use, always off when not in use.
All ePubs. No PDFs at all.
I do have a memory card, 8GB: could that be the problem? It has less than a GB of data on it.

If you are just reading, then you should be getting days and not hours of battery life. Do you have music playing? Are you constantly checking Wikipedia? Are you using the browser lots? Do you have wireless standby turned on in settings? I also usually keep Wi-fi on but 3G off to help with battery life.

Try without the memory card. The amount of power drawn by a memory card varies.

I read 2-3 hours per day, wifi and 3g always on, I charge my device about once a week.

I bought a 950 Nov. 20th. I fully charged it on the day of purchase, using the included usb/ac adapter. It's now Dec. 1st, and it's on three bars. I have an 8 gig SD card in it (the same one I was using with my 600), and it is 1/3 full. I keep wifi and 3G off.

However, the longest I have gotten to read on it at one time has been ~2 hours. IMHO and from my own experience, you should be getting much longer battery life.

In Settings;
Mobile Network is OFF
Wi-Fi is ON
Wireless Standby is ON
Standby Screen is OFF
Power Management is ON
I never listen to music on the Sony
I use the wifi/3g only when plugged into the wall wart power source. I turn off wifi/3g when I'm done using the hardware switch.
I'll try putting a few books into RAM from the SD card and remove the SD card.
Why having the SD card in should drain the battery is beyond me: it's nonvolatile memory.
Thanks for the suggestions: I especially appreciate hearing from you who have had extensive battery life: my guess is that things are not right with my particular device.

It sounds like it just might be defective. I have heard that different memory cards drain differently but am not entirely sure why. If you turn to the spec page in the manual it gives the spec for battery life, explains the condition that time was met under and the variables that can cause it to fluctuate.

That's the same issue that I ran into in Dec of 2007 when I bought my PRS-505. Everyone on this site was writing about how they get about 2 weeks of battery life and I could barely make it to 2 days. I returned it as defective and got a new one and that fixed the issue. So it does happen and you definitely got a defective 950. I would return it ASAP.

My new 950 gets charged each day. The battery icon shows all bars full.
After less than two hours of reading, the battery bars are down by one.
After 4-6 hours, there's one bar showing.
Is this normal?
Do I have a defective battery?
BestBuy says I've until the end of January to return it.
Others' battery use experience?
Thanks

It sounds like your device is defective. I did have that problem with the original PRS900 I bought. I ended up replacing the battery and the problem went away.

But before you go through the replacement process, make sure your wifi and 3g are off and then see how much battery time you get. Sometimes, the connection does not go into standby (it happened to me on the PRS950 one day when it was constantly trying to download a corrupted file - an issue of the Financial Times) and, if that's the case, your battery could drain in as little as 4-6 hours, as you describe.