Quote:
Originally Posted by elcreative
Point of touch screen is to use touch screen especially helpful for arthritic joints and/or carpal tunnel syndrome users who find button pressing exacerbates their problems and causes pain... and I read for several hours every day (anything up to 1,000 page turns) and recharge around 7-10 days when battery drops a couple of bars... really low life span!!!
And I did state "Each to his own..."
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To each his own indeed. A few days ago I read a post from someone who had a movement disorder, and the Sony's super sensitive touch screen is creating a problem for them because YOU CAN'T DISABLE IT DURING READING, so it works both ways.
Second, while I agree that you can easily get more battery life by making sure to shut down the device into standby when it will not be used for a few minutes, and shutting it down completely when it will not be used for hours or days, this is not a very friendly solution for those with joint pain either, since the main power switch is perhaps the WORST one on the device for these folks to try to deal with.
I HATE that switch on my PRS-650. It's too recessed, and requires more force than I think it should, and I can't get over the nagging feeling that, based on it's crappy design, if you use it every 5 minutes, it will probably be the FIRST thing on your reader to wear out and fail - just plain STUPID.
The similar slider switch on the Kindle 3 seems to be MUCH easier to deal with.
But getting back to the topic of the original post -
As I said, I can't speak for others, but on my own PRS-650 reader, I also ran into the issue of initially running down my battery in about 3 days, but now it's doing quite a bit better.
I think this is because -
A) When is was new I was also using it rather 'intensively'. Let's face it, the darn thing is so totally cool, that I couldn't stop playing with it.
B) The battery was brand new and had not had a chance to run through a few charge/discharge cycles and come up to full capacity.
C) The reader charge circuitry and battery gage were not yet fully calibrated based on the ACTUAL performance of the battery.
After a few weeks when I started playing with it less, and settled down and started actually
using the PRS-650 as intended to read books, the battery life improved noticeably, though I can still run it down in a week or so if I work at it.
As long as it runs long enough to get through a full book, and does that without me having to 'ride the power switch', I think it's doing it's job as an e-paper/e-ink type reader.
So, overall I am fairly pleased, but that's not to say that I wouldn't appreciate an alternate 'Kindle like' long battery life mode. When traveling, I could live without the touch-page-turns, dictionary lookups, and hyper-links, while reading if it would guarantee three weeks to a month of battery life.
Correction - *Actually* based on what I was proposing, 'live without' isn't the best choice of words, since those features could be turned back on nearly instantly when wanted.
