Quote:
Originally Posted by NatCh
Related to the light, it does seem to have an impact on the battery life. You should understand that I'm hopelessly spoiled by the approximately three weeks per charge I still get from my two-year-old PRS500, and that the unit I reviewed was a passed-around (and perhaps mildly abused) one, but it gave me about four days of use per charge. That's with about two hours of front light usage per day, and several hours of non-lit use besides. That's a fair step back from the earlier models, but still a fair amount of time per charge, particularly compared to non-e-ink devices.
I did try to refrain from using the light for a time to see what effect that would have, but circumstances conspired to interfere, and I found myself using it at night, so I don't really feel I got a good enough measure of non-lighted battery life to offer a meaningful comment on that. I can point out that Sony specifies eight hours of usage with the light turned on, so my approximately two hours of light usage per day for four days, plus some hours of usage each day without the light is actually a good deal better than the official specification.
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On my cybook, if I tried to read 5 hours a day (2 lighted plus several unlighted), I'd run out of power in two days or less. (I definately used up the battery in two days of waiting (for a relative) at a hospital, including talking to lots of doctors.) I think I use up the total number of page turns available, although I also think I'm getting fairly poor performance out of the unit. I actually get about the same reading time (at roughly the same page rate and screen size) on my Rocket with the backlight set at minimum. I've fairly often run completely out of power (unit freezes in the middle of the book), and easily run battery down to 40%. I don't think I read as fast as Derek, but I'm clicking thru pages fairly fast. At least the Rocket warned me when power got low.
My normal pattern is to add a bunch of books to the SD card, and then read 5 or 6 or maybe more before going back and finding others to add. Probably about half and half new books and re-reads, and I keep 15-30 books on the card. I end up charging about three times before I connect to the computer to add and delete books again. The annoying thing is I don't have a convenient plug to my bed, so I can't put it on the charger when I'm finished reading in bed.