I owned a Zune mp3 player for a good five year run and it’s now finally just gotten to the point of dying (headphone jack is, well…jacked.) I’ve been through a couple cheaper players recently trying to find a decent replacement without buying an ipod (I’m a fan of dragging/dropping music rather than using proprietary software to load the player, another reason I’m not looking at apple or microsoft players anymore.)
The Fuze+ is really nice and all, does what I want from it, and the UI/slightly awkward touchpad aren’t enough to turn me off, but…the battery life situation has been pretty abysmal for me.
My Zune could run throughout my full work day, from getting in my car to punching out after my shift and driving home, and be sitting with a pretty 40% or more battery charge remaining. The Fuze+ advertises up to 24 hours playback, but I’m not getting even half that…it’s running to critical levels at about the 8 hour mark at which point it shuts itself off. The backlight is set to the most conservative setting, brightness is only one tick above the minimum, the powersave feature is set to the most conservative setting…and I’m still not getting very good life out of it.
I don’t know what my bit rate on many of the files on my system is, many probably -are- above 128, but I’m certainly not using that absurd apple format that’s evidently so draining on batteries. I don’t use the screen all -that- often either…I might unlock the player to skip a song half a dozen times throughout the day, and I can’t be activating the screen for more than three or four minutes total all day. I play at fairly high volume level, since my job is noisy, I don’t know if this alone could really deplete the battery at the much faster than normal rate I’m seeing.
The charge level seems to drop really inconsistently, too…doing the math, it -should- drop around 4% per hour, but the actual rate of depletion is faster overall obviously, since I’m not getting anywhere near that 24 hours out of it, and sometimes spikes as much as 15% in a single hour. I’m not using the player any more than usual during those time periods.
I’d really like to keep using this player, but I’m hoping someone might have any sort of idea on what to do to see at least another hour or two of that 24 I can get out of this thing on a full charge. Even half of the 24 advertised hours would be wonderful.
