Troubleshooting Kindle Touch battery life

[Ginwen]

So I charged my Kindle touch all day Tuesday, read about 30 minutes yesterday, and it's down about 1/3. If I read 8-10 hours, it's pretty much completely drained and I have to charge.

I called Kindle support. They tell me that it is working as expected, since their estimates (of up to 2 months) are based on 30 minutes a day. Now I calculate that to about 30 hours of reading but they are telling me if I use it longer than 30 minutes at a time I need to charge it every day.

They say because I use it more than 30 minutes at a time, sometimes as much as 4 hours or so, I should expect to have to charge it every day. Just wondering if that's normal, and if I should have to be charging this twice a week whether I use it or not. If it is, maybe I'll just stick with my K2, since the big reason I changed was decreased battery life, and my K2 battery life now, after a couple of years at least, is about as long as my Touch brand new.

[markdek]

Give it week or 2, then test the battery life again.

[DustyDisks]

Originally Posted by Ginwen

So I charged my Kindle touch all day Tuesday, read about 30 minutes yesterday, and it's down about 1/3. If I read 8-10 hours, it's pretty much completely drained and I have to charge.

I called Kindle support. They tell me that it is working as expected, since their estimates (of up to 2 months) are based on 30 minutes a day. Now I calculate that to about 30 hours of reading but they are telling me if I use it longer than 30 minutes at a time I need to charge it every day.

They say because I use it more than 30 minutes at a time, sometimes as much as 4 hours or so, I should expect to have to charge it every day. Just wondering if that's normal, and if I should have to be charging this twice a week whether I use it or not. If it is, maybe I'll just stick with my K2, since the big reason I changed was decreased battery life, and my K2 battery life now, after a couple of years at least, is about as long as my Touch brand new.

Both the k2 and K3 batterys can be replaced, K1 also, for about 40 or so dollars. Easy do it yourself task.

Others can chime in about the touch, myself haven't a clue! But if amazon says it is normal, they should know.

Just know the more it is used, the sooner the need to be charge.

[frankelr]

It sounds like nonsense to me, battery life is determined by discharge over time, indexing and the number of page changes. I own two one year old K3 keyboards and a nook touch and all three are exhibiting better life than my kindle touch. I was going to wait about "returning or exchanging" it. But if they are starting to spout nonsense and giving people a hard time, maybe I should just return it before my 30 days are up?

About the only thing I can think of, which might justify what they told you, is if you are using the really large font and hence doing many more page turns than is typical.

I'd like to read what others think.

[shinew]

that doesn't sound normal for the Touch, unless you're an insanely fast reader(or use really large texts) and turn pages every few seconds. The battery doesn't really care much about how long you read, it's all about screen refresh and using other features that require processing(page turning, dictionary lookup, x-ray, etc...), so it depends on individual usage. And my experience with Amazon CS is that they don't always know what they're talking about, just excellent with return/exchange stuff.

Couple of questions might help narrow down the issue:
1) when did you start using the Touch?
2) how many books do you have on it and when did you load them in?
3) have you tried a soft reset? or even a factory reset?

[Ginwen]

I don't read a big font, or insanely fast.

I got it the 17th. I do have a lot of books on it, several hundred (thanks Baen). I added those when I first got it, so I expected some battery life issues initially as they were indexed.

I did a factory reset when it was new (when I was adding all the books it got pretty messed up due to a couple of corrupt books), I haven't reset since. I have had to power it off a time or two when the screen froze, I think that's probably a soft reset (had to hold the button down 20 seconds and all that).

I am thinking I will just read on my K2 for a few days and see how the battery life is when I'm not using it at all. My suspicion is that it will deplete a bunch even not reading at all, but I'll have to see. That should still leave me some time in the 30 days if I'm not just not happy.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by Ginwen

So I charged my Kindle touch all day Tuesday, read about 30 minutes yesterday, and it's down about 1/3. If I read 8-10 hours, it's pretty much completely drained and I have to charge.

I called Kindle support. They tell me that it is working as expected, since their estimates (of up to 2 months) are based on 30 minutes a day. Now I calculate that to about 30 hours of reading but they are telling me if I use it longer than 30 minutes at a time I need to charge it every day.

They say because I use it more than 30 minutes at a time, sometimes as much as 4 hours or so, I should expect to have to charge it every day. Just wondering if that's normal, and if I should have to be charging this twice a week whether I use it or not. If it is, maybe I'll just stick with my K2, since the big reason I changed was decreased battery life, and my K2 battery life now, after a couple of years at least, is about as long as my Touch brand new.

Sounds like you got a clueless support person. It happens sometimes. Now there are a few things that will drain the battery.

Is it WiFi or 3G? Do you leave WiFi or 3G on? These will drain the battery fairly quickly. I own a K4 with half the battery capacity. I read about the same as you do. I charge mine every 18 days. I leave WiFi off but if I keep WiFi on I get about 14 days.

You could have a book stuck indexing. If you add alot of books always plug the KT in so your battery doesn't drain. Indexing will drain the battery faster then anything. To check for stuck indexing. Do a search on your homepage using random letters and see if it shows any items not index.

I own a K3 with 3G and your battery life sounds like it if I leave WiFi on. If I leave it off I get 3 weeks of charge. 3G sucks battery down fast because on the K3 it never turns off unless WiFi is off too. It could be this way on the Kindle Touch too. I don't know for sure because I don't own one yet...

If you don't have a stuck book indexing, haven't added alot of books and leave WiFi off and still getting the same battery life then you need to exchange your Kindle there is definitely something wrong.

[VictoriaP]

Um...I think you got some bad CS advice there. That doesn't sound normal to me.

Start with the obvious: wifi on or off?

With wifi off, I can get four or five days of multi-hour daily reading on the Touch before it dips to 25% or so. But if wifi is on, the battery drops like a stone, even worse than leaving 3G on with the K2 ever did. Wifi on means I get maybe two days before I have to recharge.

Assuming wifi is off, have you checked to see if everything has indexed? (For those who don't know how to check this, run a search. If the Kindle is still indexing your books or has run into a problem, there will be a listing for "Not Yet Indexed". Unless you just recently downloaded these, you're best off deleting them and redownloading.)

If it *appears* to have indexed everything, and another 20 second reset doesn't fix the problem either, a file still may be corrupt. Unfortunately the only way to know on that is to basically start over, clearing the Kindle and adding only a few files at a time, with a wait in between to see if your battery usage changes.

One other thought: are you using the Amazon lighted case? It *shouldn't* be an issue, but I'd want to confirm that by not using it for a time before I eliminated it as a potential cause here.

(LOL--cross posted with Blossom!)

[Ginwen]

Thanks. You guys are awesome. I have been leaving wireless off, but there are actually 800+ items not indexed (I kind of underestimated how many books I have on this thing ). I'm thinking that may be the culprit. It sounds like I will need to just take them off to figure out which one (or which ones) are causing the problem.

[DustyDisks]

Originally Posted by Ginwen

Thanks. You guys are awesome. I have been leaving wireless off, but there are actually 800+ items not indexed (I kind of underestimated how many books I have on this thing ). I'm thinking that may be the culprit. It sounds like I will need to just take them off to figure out which one (or which ones) are causing the problem.

Take them off and then add a small bunch at a time, back on to your kindle. Plus leave the power cord plugged in, when on ext power it will index faster. Your kindle maybe stuck on a bad file (book).

Or leave your books alone on the unit and if you can see which book that your indexing is stuck on, delete it, and keep checking to see if the indexing list gets shorter over time.

But from what I understand it is better to leave your kindle plugged in to external power so it will index faster.

Others here may have better advice.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Ginwen

Thanks. You guys are awesome. I have been leaving wireless off, but there are actually 800+ items not indexed (I kind of underestimated how many books I have on this thing ). I'm thinking that may be the culprit. It sounds like I will need to just take them off to figure out which one (or which ones) are causing the problem.

You should probably recharge it each night until it finishes indexing.

It might have been better to have only added a few dozen books at a time so that it doesn't get overwhelmed all at once.

There have also been reports that putting books into subdirectories in the documents directory makes a Kindle with a lot of books more stable.

Do you have 800+ books on your Kindle 2 as well without trouble? Did you put them all on it at once, or over time?

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by Ginwen

Thanks. You guys are awesome. I have been leaving wireless off, but there are actually 800+ items not indexed (I kind of underestimated how many books I have on this thing ). I'm thinking that may be the culprit. It sounds like I will need to just take them off to figure out which one (or which ones) are causing the problem.

Yep! There's your battery problem right there. You added too many books at one time so it's choking. I would start over. Add small batches of 100 and leave the Touch plugged in till it finishes indexing. It takes about 10 books an hour if they are normal size novels.

I would do another factory reset to get rid of any corrupted files. I would then add small batches of 100 and leave the Touch plugged in till it finishes then add another 100 and so on. It will index faster if it's plugged in. So this may take a day or so to do. You shouldn't use it during that time either.

Personally I'd never add that many books to my Kindle. I use Dropbox to host my ebooks and download them to my Kindle as needed using the Kindle's browser. I have less then 50 ebooks on my Kindles.

You are the third K2 owner I have come across trying to dump a large library on the Touch and having issues. So I have to ask does the K2 do indexing like the newer Kindles?

[VictoriaP]

Yes, the K2 indexes similarly. I think it's just that for the K2 owners, well, we haven't done this sort of thing in a while. We forget about the whole need to index everything all over again with a new Kindle, since our K2’s have been indexed forever. LOL

Having said that, my Touch indexed over 400 books in just a few hours, certainly less than overnight. I downloaded everything I had in my Archives one Touch screen worth at a time, then when each batch said "download complete", started the next batch. Perhaps it went faster because they were strictly from Amazon, or because they'd all been indexed already on the K2? No idea. But I did those first and made sure indexing was done before loading my Calibre library in there, or adding my collection from Baen (both of those are pretty small batches). Current inventory on the Touch is 468, sorted into 39 Collections.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by VictoriaP

Yes, the K2 indexes similarly. I think it's just that for the K2 owners, well, we haven't done this sort of thing in a while. We forget about the whole need to index everything all over again with a new Kindle, since our K2’s have been indexed forever. LOL

Having said that, my Touch indexed over 400 books in just a few hours, certainly less than overnight. I downloaded everything I had in my Archives one Touch screen worth at a time, then when each batch said "download complete", started the next batch. Perhaps it went faster because they were strictly from Amazon, or because they'd all been indexed already on the K2? No idea. But I did those first and made sure indexing was done before loading my Calibre library in there, or adding my collection from Baen (both of those are pretty small batches). Current inventory on the Touch is 468, sorted into 39 Collections.

It could be Amazon books index faster I've never taken too much notice. I don't keep many of them on my Kindles I sideload pretty much everything. I do know the Touch will choke if you try to do too many things at once. I've seen several instances since it release where a Kindle Touch owner was asking for help or thought something was wrong with their unit which could also be the case. but most of the time they just overloaded it.

I say 100 because in case a book gets stuck it easier to track it down then throwing 400 on there at a time. I'm talking about Sideloaded books not Amazon Archive items.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Ginwen

Thanks. You guys are awesome. I have been leaving wireless off, but there are actually 800+ items not indexed (I kind of underestimated how many books I have on this thing ). I'm thinking that may be the culprit. It sounds like I will need to just take them off to figure out which one (or which ones) are causing the problem.

You can actually see a list of the books it has not yet indexed. Search for '.' on your Home screen, that will return search results with a summary of how many items it has yet to complete (or 'no items found'). Touch the summary and it will show the list of unindexed items, and what it is working (or stuck) on.

A typical index issue arises if you move something with DRM from one Kindle to another. It cannot open these items to index them, because the DRM key is different for each device. The other case is a corrupt file. Last is the possibility that some process has the file open.

BTW I just checked on my KT and it has 7 items that are not indexed! Six of them are Samples that have been on there for at least 24 hours, the other is Amazon Daily digest/blog, which probably just downloaded recently. I think there is something wrong, i.e. a Bug. The samples happen to be some that I sent from a web browser, i.e. not ones I requested on the Kindle itself.

I did a Restart on the theory that files are getting held open. Nothing seemed to happen. Then I opened and then deleted Amazon Daily (which was listed first on the list of unindexed items). After a couple of minutes, everything is indexed. Perhaps the reset was not necessary.

I suspect that I was reading Amazon Daily when a new version downloaded, and that this created a problem somehow. Or who knows. I'll definitely be checking this more often!