A question with regard to Kindle 3's battery life

[truthiselliptical]

Greetings!

First of all, please forgive me if I'm asking something stupid (or something that has been asked before), but I'm new around, and I'll admit I haven't had the opportunity to look around the community much.

That being said, I've a question, and I am hoping perhaps someone could enlighten me. :)

The Kindle manual says that the battery should last about a month (with wireless off, which, in my case, it always is). I've been using it somewhere between 6 and 8 hours per day, and it needed recharging around every 10-12 days. Is that normal? I've only used it this much for about a month, and before (and since), the battery life has been within range (or whatever Amazon.com calls "range"), but still, am curious...

My logic dictates that the it isn't the TIME itself that matters, but page-turns. Still, is that anywhere in "normal" range for a Kindle 3?

And something else, also related to the battery-life: after you upload a ton of books on it, does it DO anything that eats up insane amounts of battery-life? Like, I don't know, indexing or anything similar? After I put books on it it kind of froze and worked rather sluggishly and then the battery (which has been about half-full) just depleted itself FAST. The consumption rate looks normal now, but then it was just... weird.

Thank you for your time, and, again, I do hope I haven't broken any community rules or something. :)

Comments

[owlectomy]

I think that both of those are pretty typical, in my experience. Indexing does take a lot of work for the processor, and page-turning depletes the battery whereas leaving it off doesn't, so reading for hours and hours a day will deplete the battery much faster. (I don't read that must, and I typically recharge every 2 weeks or so, but I also turn the wireless on occasionally.)

[jumpuphigh]

I don't have a Kindle but in my experience, when companies estimate the time the battery will last, they way underestimate it for the amount of reading that I do. It is completely about page-turns for the newer readers, at least.

I looked up the Kindle 3 on the mobile reads wiki and this is what it had to say about battery life:

Battery Life of Up to Two Months. A single charge lasts up to two months with wireless off (1/2 hour reading time per day). Up to 10 day battery life with wireless enabled

So, it sounds like you are getting the appropriate amount of use per charge.

[zippitgood]

Yeah, I've found that reading a lot depletes the battery. So I think it's typical and the month long battery thing is for when you don't read a lot per day.

[kaiz]

needed recharging around every 10-12 days

Sounds about what I get based upon my usage, which is every day, about 2 - 3 hours per day.

Recently, I've gotten in the habit of plugging it in and letting it charge and download news over night.

FWIW, I have a ton of collections on my Kindle which has definitely affected performance. My page turns these days aren't as, er, snappy (for lack of a better) word as when I had very few or no collections defined. The speed at with the menu pops up and I can navigate between documents also seems to be affected. It also seemed as if the performance slowed down when I had a lot of news articles archived.

[seryn]

Yes, it indexes every word.

If I'm downloading a lot of books, I do so while it's charging so I don't notice a decrease in battery life.

I have gotten 3 weeks out of my Kindle 3. But not if I've been playing a lot of the games, using the light (on the cover) or using the wireless or 3G, or using the music player. Plain reading when I haven't altered my library doesn't seem to cause problems with the battery life for me.

If I play games at night using the light and have just sent a bunch of fic to my Kindle, I generally charge it for an hour about once a week. That keeps it solidly in the middle two-thirds of battery range.

If you can read on it all day for almost 2 weeks without charging, that seems pretty decent.

[shanaqui]

Sounds pretty normal to me. It isn't the actual time that matters, but the amount of time you spend using it. Naturally, actually having it on, indexing books, turning pages, etc, costs more, battery wise.

[bookofjude]

Further to the comments that it's about the time you spend using it, a lot of it relates to how quickly you read, and what font size you use: the faster you read, or the larger the font, the more often you need to change pages. Therefore, 6-8 hours one day may not necessarily be equivalent to 6-8 hours the next day: the same amount of time might be spent, but the amount of page turns is significantly increased.

(Feel free to ignore this, as I'm assuming it's a relatively well-known fact: so long as there are no background processes (Wi-fi, light, etc), the Kindle (and other equivalent e-Ink devices) only require electrical charge to put the words on the screen. Once they're there, you may as well consider it as being in a switched-off, though it probably needs a little bit extra juice than actually being switched off in order to be able to quickly respond to button presses, etc.)

My Dad uses his Kindle about 2-4 hours every day, and he seems to get roughly three to four weeks of use out of it. I personally never have Wi-Fi on, and use USB and Calibre to transfer files onto it. However, on the flip side, I use my Kindle rarely but for large bursts: 8-10 hours of reading for a week or so, and then nothing for another week or so.

[willow]

Without a light and without using the wireless at all, and making sure to load new books while it was charging; I tested this out, cause I was getting worried. And I got just about 10 days (maybe going into an extra half a day) and that was with me reading pretty much 'non stop'.

I reached, hmm, book five I think it was, in CJ Cherryh's Foreigner Series. I read fairly quickly in general, though I find w/ only one page to stare at I focus more on a kindle. And I was purposely counting the days. The last day I didn't stretch all the way out, but the little lightening bolt was showing on the battery for sure and I read with it like that for as long as I dared (until I think a warning pop up comes).

It cemented for me that the battery life wasn't tested against people who can get lost in books for hours for days on end.