Hands-On Report--Video iPod Performance
To do this, we ran our video iPod's battery completely down and recharged it. Then we set it to "Repeat All" with the backlight, EQ and Sound Check Off but with Apple's standard earbuds connected. When our songs or music videos began to play, we disconnected the AC adapter, noted the time and left it to run down.
Our 30GB video iPod played songs for 13 hours and 52 minutes before displaying the warning that it was going to shut off automatically. This is technically 8 minutes earlier than Apple's claim of 14 hours but we aren't going to quibble with those results. Perhaps Apple's claimed playing time was measured without the earbuds which may suck a little additional juice from the battery. Or more likely, there is some variation among iPods and between runs of such tests. Christopher Breen noted in Playlist that his video iPod played songs for 14 hours and 4 minutes, some 12 minutes longer than ours, but he didn't note if he had the earbuds connected or not. Anyway, about 14 hours for songs is good enough for us.
Music videos played continuously for 2 hours and 29 minutes before showing the shutdown warning. This is 29 minutes longer than Apple's claim of 2 hours for the 30GB video iPod, a pleasant surprise. Christopher Breen noted in Playlist that his video iPod played video for 2 hours and 22 minutes, some 7 minutes less than ours. Again, there is probably some minor variation among iPods and between charges. Nearly 2.5 hours of constant video is adequate to make video worthwhile. We might even try a feature-length movie on our next cross-country flight just to see if we can watch it for that long. [Bill Fox]
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