What’s going on with the batteries in the V2 Fuzes? I bought 2 new 8gb Fuze’s (for me and my wife) and the silver one gets about 7-8 hours battery time and the black one has a 8gb memory card and gets about 5 hours. I’ve had them for almost 2 weeks and each has been recharged about 10 times. The battery time isn’t getting any longer with more charges, as some have stated here. I know it’s not my settings or my mp3s and I have the latest firmware. I’m also not using the EQ either or have any videos on them, strictly mp3s. I still get around 14-15 hours battery time with my trusty old e280. I was hoping for more battery time than this with the new Fuzes, like at least 12 hours or more. I’ve seen others having the same problem with the V2’s. Is there a defect in the V2’s battery that Sansa refuses to acknowledge. Other than the low battery life issue, these Fuzes work great.
That’s wierd! I’ve got a V2 & the thing seams to last forever. Never actually tried to clock it, but I’ve used it pretty heavily & it goes for over a week. Maybe you got 2 lemons. Sorry dude. What are the odds?
Can you return them? If it was a bad batch I would buy them from somewhere else. Haven’t tried a V2 fuze, but they should be identical in terms of the end user experience. Hmm…
My husband and I wondered the same things. Ours ran perfectly, only needing charged about every 3 days…then we updated the firmware and now they don’t make it though a full day at all. Has anyone figured out why this is doing it? It’s really annoying having to charge every single day.
Try downgrading the firmware? Unless the newer firmware had improvements you needed.
Hmm. I’ve upgraded to 2.3.31 firmware and am getting about 10 or so hours before I hit the red bar and charge up if I spot it, though it will play for a good while longer. I’ve not clocked it accurately yet though but its nowhere near the time quoted in the specs. Fuze’s battery life isn’t great BUT being a lithium polymer battery it should hold its charge between plays very well which for me makes up for this. Many players only have li-ion batteries which IMHO aren’t as good long term.
I play only FLACs though - ripped at FLAC 5 quality - with replay gain on and EQ set to normal. Most of this playback is at night in bed, listening very very quietly through Koss KSC75s till I nod off (and strangle myself with the wires). 2.2.26 firmware was about the same. I always thought my battery life was a too low and was disappointed the new firmware didn’t improve things noticably but I’ve learned that with FLAC battery life takes a hammering anyway. I’d guess if you’re using mp3s you can expect much longer, but it’ll drop as you increase the quality of your rips (lame v0 or 320 using much more battery than say v5 or 128kbps).
If you find you’ve got 2 lemons - don’t let this put you off. But I’d get my replacements elsewhere to avoid that batch! I’ve had a much more expensive sony conk out w/i a couple of months and another go back under warranty just w/i a year after little use - just luck of the draw…
In any case - it’d be interesting to hear what sort of battery life other folk are getting with different formats (mp3s, FLAC etc) and quality (v0, v2, FLAC level etc) with whatever firmware, of course??? After all, it’s how much the Fuze is re-charged that’ll decide for most of us how long the player itself will last.
kitt wrote:
Hmm. I’ve upgraded to 2.3.31 firmware and am getting about 10 or so hours before I hit the red bar and charge up if I spot it, though it will play for a good while longer. I’ve not clocked it accurately yet though but its nowhere near the time quoted in the specs. Fuze’s battery life isn’t great BUT being a lithium polymer battery it should hold its charge between plays very well which for me makes up for this. Many players only have li-ion batteries which IMHO aren’t as good long term.
I play only FLACs though - ripped at FLAC 5 quality - with replay gain on and EQ set to normal. Most of this playback is at night in bed, listening very very quietly through Koss KSC75s till I nod off (and strangle myself with the wires). 2.2.26 firmware was about the same. I always thought my battery life was a too low and was disappointed the new firmware didn’t improve things noticably but I’ve learned that with FLAC battery life takes a hammering anyway. I’d guess if you’re using mp3s you can expect much longer, but it’ll drop as you increase the quality of your rips (lame v0 or 320 using much more battery than say v5 or 128kbps).
If you find you’ve got 2 lemons - don’t let this put you off. But I’d get my replacements elsewhere to avoid that batch! I’ve had a much more expensive sony conk out w/i a couple of months and another go back under warranty just w/i a year after little use - just luck of the draw…
In any case - it’d be interesting to hear what sort of battery life other folk are getting with different formats (mp3s, FLAC etc) and quality (v0, v2, FLAC level etc) with whatever firmware, of course??? After all, it’s how much the Fuze is re-charged that’ll decide for most of us how long the player itself will last.
If you search through the forum, these types of tests have been done before. 
…presumably on older firmwares though? So 2.3.31 has no affect for anyone? I’m getting no noticable difference in performance between vesrion 26 and the latest but will use whichever works best for battery life with my FLACs.
kitt wrote:
…presumably on older firmwares though? So 2.3.31 has no affect for anyone? I’m getting no noticable difference in performance between vesrion 26 and the latest but will use whichever works best for battery life with my FLACs.
I never noticed any difference in battery life from firmware to firmware when I had my Fuze, or with my 2 Clips. In each case, FLACs dropped battery life by roughly 40-50% compared to my normal combinations of mp3 and wma files. My Fuze, I did a test with mp3, and I’m not sure if it was the .22 or .26 firmware at the time of the test…you can read that thread here. As far as the Fuze, the video bug people mentioned with the .26 firmware never bothered me, because I didn’t use the video feature. For my audio-only needs, the .26 firmware was rock-solid.
I did another one with a Clip,trying FLACs on it, which netted me just over 8 hours…Clips were rated 15 hours with 128 mp3’s, and I got about 11 with WMA VBR files, and usually about 13-14 with a mix of mp3 and wma.
@marvin_martian wrote:
@kitt wrote:
…presumably on older firmwares though? So 2.3.31 has no affect for anyone? I’m getting no noticable difference in performance between vesrion 26 and the latest but will use whichever works best for battery life with my FLACs.
I never noticed any difference in battery life from firmware to firmware when I had my Fuze, or with my 2 Clips. In each case, FLACs dropped battery life by roughly 40-50% compared to my normal combinations of mp3 and wma files. My Fuze, I did a test with mp3, and I’m not sure if it was the .22 or .26 firmware at the time of the test…you can read that thread here. As far as the Fuze, the video bug people mentioned with the .26 firmware never bothered me, because I didn’t use the video feature. For my audio-only needs, the .26 firmware was rock-solid.
I did another one with a Clip,trying FLACs on it, which netted me just over 8 hours…Clips were rated 15 hours with 128 mp3’s, and I got about 11 with WMA VBR files, and usually about 13-14 with a mix of mp3 and wma.
Interesting info, and in your other post thanks. I don’t use my Fuze for video either- purely music and mostly played at lowest volume so I’d been expecting a bit longer battery life than most people. looks like it’s about right. I’m not bothered so long as it doesn’t mean there’s a problem with the little beauty. I’d happily switch back to v26 firmware too, though with v26 I did have a problem with a Mono FLAC album that I need to recode in 2 channel sound stereo before it’d play. I think there was something in the v31 release notes about improving FLAC playback or something like that, which made the upgrade look worthwhile. I was hoping for slightly longer battery life with the latest firmware.
Going back to the OP - it’d be interesting to know from ptt20 if the same mp3s give better life on any replacement Fuzes, with and without memory cards, or if changing firmware made any difference. If there are duff Fuzes, it’d be good to know where they were bought. Odds of 2 lemons are pretty low so could be a bad batch.
Kitt
Do you have the screen brightness set to minimum and the screen time also set to minimum? The screen eats plenty of power, especially at higher beightness settings.
It sure would be nice if the system info contained an entry for “time power-up since last charge”.
(along with a bunch of other info I’d like to be able to see).
Last week I received a substitute Fuze 8Gb v2 for my 10 month old Fuze which screen gone bonkers. The new one works OK, but I also noticed a significant reduction of battery life. One chagre lasts only about 10 hours - this is playing the same files as on my old Fuze and using the same wall charger. The old one lasted nearly 18 hours. Weird.
NB It is recommended to use wall charges for Fuze because some computer USB doesn’t provide enough voltage to charge battery properly. But in my case I use a good wall charger.
Message Edited by Etoja on 02-24-2010 04:28 AM
