Just to add some more anecdotal evidence, I too have had battery life problems with my Clip+ 8GB.
I’ve had it just over a month now. I would say average battery life is probably about 6 hours. On a couple of occasions it has gone for twice that long. On a couple of occasions it has gone flat within (approximately) 3 hours of use. I only use it to listen to mp3 files. No other formats, radio or voice recordings.
It’s rare that I’ll listen to it for more than 6 hours in a day, so it is not a huge problem for me. What is more of a problem is that the battery level display is very buggy, as a few people here have mentioned. What normally happens is that I will charge it to full, and then listen to about 1 or 2 hours of music, which depletes the battery to about 80-something percent. Another couple of hours and it will drop to about 40 percent. And then it will deplete very slowly for a while, until it reaches about 30 percent, after which it can go from 30 percent to flat within the space of a 3-minute pop song.
It’s difficult to be sure if it’s a meter calibration problem rather than a problem with the battery. The generally short life of the battery in my unit suggests to me that there are problems with the battery itself, but it is possible that inaccurate meter readings are an additional problem on top of that issue.
Overall I’m very pleased with my Clip+, but a few minor problems persist which would make me hesitant to recommend it to a friend.
