Quote:
Originally Posted by Fortissimo
Thanks pinecone, delphin & elcreative. Please assess this . . .
Thanks.
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Those ratings of thousands of page turns are highly theoretical, and are based on someone just standing there repetitively turning pages as fast as possible.
At one page turn a second, you could in theory do about 3600 page turns in an hour, and though I haven't tried this, I don't doubt that you could get several thousand page turns on one charge under these conditions.
But when you are actually
using the reader, then the math gets a little more complicated.
For example, if you did the exact opposite of the above, and changed pages as
slowly as possible (without the reader actually timing out and going into sleep mode), then it might surprise you, but I would be very surprised if the reader can run more than about 40 hours straight.
Even at a very leisurely rate, with these very slow page changes, you should still be able to finish your book given 40 hours.
If you read quickly (let's say a page change every 30 seconds), then things would be even be worse, and you might only get 20 or 30 hours of actual reading, but this would be more than enough time to finish a book or two because of the faster reading rate.
So, this isn't as bad as it sounds.
Using the sleep feature instead of completely shutting down the reader also causes an additional battery drain.
From my experience so far with my PRS-650, I would estimate that just being in sleep standby mode, draws enough power to run the battery down completely in about 7 to 10 days.
This is because the SDRAM memory chips in the PRS-650 are active while it is in standby and need to be refreshed even though the CPU is sleeping. If Sony had used fully static CMOS memory, then the standby power would be almost negligible, but a quarter GIG of CMOS would be much more expensive, so like everyone else, Sony uses SDRAM.
By keeping the memory active, the PRS-650 can wake up from sleep almost instantly, but the downside is that you have this constant draw on the battery, so you are looking at about a week and a half battery life EVEN IF YOU DO ALMOST NO READING.
So you pick it; The battery life is . . .
Thousands of page turns in a couple hours -
-or-
Twenty to Forty Hours of constant reading -
-or-
Seven to Ten Days in sleep mode standby (even with little or no reading) -
-or-
Weeks and weeks of intermittent use (if completely powered off when idle) -
-or-
Several Months when powered off and unused -
Obviously, in ACTUAL USE you will have mix of the above situations, and your battery life will vary accordingly.
In actual practice, if I shut down the reader completely when not in use, and try to read straight through without too many distractions (which would cause me to set down the PRS-650 without shutting it down) then I can easily read two, or possibly even three, full length novels on a single charge, over two or three weeks of intermittent reading time.
As a practical matter, I often don't bother to shut down the reader overnight (just letting it go into sleep/stanby mode), and this cuts down the battery life somewhat, so I'm happy if I can read one full length novel over the course of 5 to 7 days.