Hi all,
I have a Fuze v2 for a couple of days now and as others on this board have already remarked, the battery life is very low, much lower than the advertised 24 hours. (About 10 hours in my case.)
So my question is, should I return my Fuze? I bought mine on Amazon, so I have 2 weeks to do so. Or is this a general problem of all 2nd generation models?
Btw, I’m using the original earphones and the backlight is set to the default 15 seconds.
During those 10 hours, what are you doing?
Shuffle? Jumping around from artist to artist? watching videos? viewing photos?
The music you are playing, is it in mp3 format?
Just as an experiment this last weekend, I charged my player to 100% and then I set my player up to start playing all my music back-to-back-to-back. the only thing I ever did was to check on the battery status every couple hours. Otherwise, I just let it play continuous mp3’s.
After 18 hours, it was down to 10%.
It finally shut down somewhere between 21 and 22 hours.
Of course, this is like the maximum time I’ll ever get. I’m sure even having the shuffle turned on takes just a bit more power than normal.
I have learned something about the behavior of lithium polymer batteries, since spending a few years with them now. They take a few charge cycles before optimum performance is reached. You’ll notice that the charge will last longer after a few charge cycles.
Pair this against reality: the rated maximum efficiency of any portable media player is entertaining at best. It’s like mileage comparisons- your mileage may vary, of course. All manufacturers benchmark their devices using a basic audio file, then choose a moderate bit rate, and then let them play along without disturbing them. That’s all fine and dandy, great for advertising and bragging rights, but we all use our devices a little bit differently.
From what I’ve seen, marginal performance is not common. Either your Sansa will fly through the battery in a few hours, meaning that there’s a genuine battery issue, or you’ll get a reasonable service time. Video playback, with its high bit rate and constant-on display, will consume those electrons at a precipitous rate, four or five hours. Audio can run the gamut of consumption, with high bit rate FLAC being the biggest consumer, and audiobooks at 32kbps the lowest.
Any time you wake up the display with a command, the backlight LEDs are active, and they are a big draw, so set your display to a reasonable 15 seconds or less.
Give your battery a chance to “break in”, and I’m sure you’ll see an improvement!
Bob :smileyvery-happy:
The custom EQ also hits the battery pretty hard, as I recall…and asides from backlight time, brightness settings play a role too.
@marvin_martian wrote:
The custom EQ also hits the battery pretty hard , as I recall…and asides from backlight time, brightness settings play a role too.
I did not know this. That’s a shame, because I found an equalizer (Try something around 5, 0, 1, 5, 10. It’s kind of like the jazz equalizer with more bass) that makes nearly every pair of earphones sound really good, or a lot better.
Call me spoiled, but I always use the Jazz setting in the custom EQ, on my Clips, Clip+, Fuze, and e280v2. The custom EQ algorithm does take some processor power, but it’s a few percentage points at worst. The headphone and volume are probably larger factors.
For the “battery life marathon”, the custom EQ was switched off, of course.
Bob :smileyvery-happy:
saxmaster765 wrote:
@marvin_martian wrote:
The custom EQ also hits the battery pretty hard , as I recall…and asides from backlight time, brightness settings play a role too.
I did not know this. That’s a shame, because I found an equalizer (Try something around 5, 0, 1, 5, 10. It’s kind of like the jazz equalizer with more bass) that makes nearly every pair of earphones sound really good, or a lot better.
I’m pretty sure that Sansafix told us sometime last year that it was a 10% hit on the battery.
neutron_bob wrote:
Call me spoiled, but I always use the Jazz setting in the custom EQ, on my Clips, Clip+, Fuze, and e280v2. The custom EQ algorithm does take some processor power, but it’s a few percentage points at worst. The headphone and volume are probably larger factors.
For the “battery life marathon”, the custom EQ was switched off, of course.
Bob :smileyvery-happy:
I don’t think the presets hit the battery nearly as hard as the custom settings…but I could be wrong.
Thanks for all your replies.
I watched a couple of short video clips the day I got my Fuze because I wanted to play with my new toy. After that I recharged it up to 100% and only listened to music (all in mp3 format) - no videos or photos while I clocked its battery life, just ordinary usage: toying with the equalizer, browsing folders and so on. And yes, I lowered the brightness quite a bit.
@neutron_bob:
I hope you are right. Although in my experience performance after a few charge cycles is not that different in comparison to the performance of virgin batteries. There is a difference, yes, but 10 vs. 24 hours seems a bit much to me. But don’t know… I read a lot of customer reviews before buying the Fuze and many of them stated a battery life of 18-20 hours, some even more. I think that’s causing my irritation right now.
In case it helps, these are my current equalizer settings: 10 6 2 5 9
If your battery life doesn’t improve after a few charge cycles, then you really should return/exchange it. You’re getting less battery life than I am and I’ve been playing only FLAC files lately.
I ran a short test a couple of weeks ago, and after 6 hours of playing FLAC songs, only 40% of my battery was used up. So I can get at least 12 hours of playtime, with a normal EQ.
I clocked battery life much more accurately now by repeating Stripe1966’s experiment and the battery lasted around 22 hours. :smiley: I never expected the display to have such a large impact on playtime.
Navarre, did you leave the eaphones in the socket during this experiment?
That’s what I did. And in addition the equalizer was set to normal and volume to 50%.
The display has a huge effect on battery life. If you set the backlight to the highest setting, and have the backlight on all the time, battery life might be under 3 hours. I normally use my Fuze with the backlight setting on minimum and the display time very low.
I’ve tried to run my Fuze from fully charged to the finale. (The Fuze is a substitute for my failed Fuze and I received it 2 weeks ago. ) The equalizer was set on the neutral, middle settings, the volume was somewhere 60 percent, screen off, and it played 320-44 mp3 as a loop. Wow, I am impressed - it lasted 22 hours and about 40 minutes. I hadn’t expected this considering the high bitrate of the mp3.
To charge it I used a generic charger bought from amazon for £1.99 (1000ma)
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