Quote:
Originally Posted by elcreative
Nice analysis and summation of all the points some of us keep reiterating... here's hoping it's not necessary again... but I doubt it...   |
Sorry if my summary rehashed, but I thought it would be beneficial to summarize the most salient points.
As a final note, for those of you who have reported that finding a charger was not an issue for you, because you were able to just use one of your old cell phone chargers - good for you, because that was the whole point of trying to standardize these chargers in the first place.
The idea was supposed to be that, with new generations of electronic devices coming out every few months, at least the chargers could be recycled and reused, lessening the amount of disposable e-waste that gets trashed every few months.
In America this standard does not seem to have taken hold yet, so my cell phone charger could NOT be used.
Amazon recognizes this and ships a tiny AC plug to USB charge adapter with their Kindle to U.S. customers, but Sony has never been generous with accessory items that they could charge for anyway, and with this wonderful eco-excuse handy, they decided to opt for maximizing their profits as usual.
After all, you have to hook the reader up to the PC periodically to transfer books anyway, right? - and, in a pinch, the PC will work just fine as a charger, right?
Unfortunately, also thanks to eco-friendly design features, PCs have this nasty habit of going to sleep and SHUTTING DOWN THE USB PORTS to save power after as little as 20 minutes, which I am sure has created a ton of "This stupid thing won't hold a charge" problems and a lot of product returns on the PRS-650 for Sony.
Indeed, there are at least THREE things that can create these kinds of "Doesn't stay charged" problems.
1. As already noted, some older USB chargers will not charge the PRS-650.
2. When charged from the PC, the PRS-650 may receive only a partial charge if the PC's power save features shut down the USB ports before charging is complete.
3. MP3 playback drops the battery life from weeks to hours, and the PRS-650 stupidly does not have a smart 'jack sense' switch to detect that headphones are not actually plugged into the device. So, if the user doesn't notice that it has been accedentally turned on by seeing the musical note Icon at the bottom of the screen, then the battery life will drop to less than a single day.
All of these things taken together seem to have conspired to give the new Sony PRS-350/650 readers a bit of a reputation for battery/charger issues.
Sony could have very easily avoided all these issues by suppling a proper charger and designing the unit so that it would automatically disable MP3 playback when no headphones are plugged into the device, but they didn't, so the best we can do is . . .
1. Get an inexpensive charger that IS PRS-650 compatible (less than $10 on Amazon)
2. If charging from a PC, make sure that the PC's sleep or automatic power saving settings are either disabled completely or set to at least 3 hours to give the PRS-650 time to fully charge (some PC's may keep the ports active while sleeping, so this may, or may not, be an issue).
3. Watch for the little 'musical note' icon next to the battery charge indicator at the bottom of the PRS-650 screen, and make sure that background MP3 audio playback is actually OFF when not wanted. As an additional precaution, you might want to ALSO make sure that you leave the REPEAT feature OFF, and that a long album or audio book is NOT selected for playback. This will give additional protection, just in case the "Resume Playback" function should be activated by something brushing the touch screen (kind of rare, but I have had it happen once). If you leave the player set to the short demo track for example, with the 'repeat' feature off, then even in the worst case that something does accentually 'Resume Playback' then the background audio will only run a few minutes till it reaches the end of that track. On the other hand, if you leave a long multi-track audio book selected, or have any of the music repeat modes turned on, there will be nothing to stop the unintended audio playback, and you can expect the battery to drain quite quickly.
Again, sorry if it seems like this subject has been beat to death, but the whole point is, that with just a little attention to these minor issues, nearly all of the reported problems that folks have been having in getting their PRS-650 to charge, and keeping it charged, should go away.
