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Apple iPod Update Increases Battery Life
hhoor writes "Apple has released iPod Software 1.2.6. According to Apple, 'After updating the iPod, customers can expect at least 10 days of standby battery life on a full charge.' So maybe now it's really time to buy one."
Sounds good to me! I wish there was some feedback here before I update my iPod, to see if Apple messes something up on my system.
Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
Time to buy one? I have tried buying one since the beginning of January. Out of stock... new upcoming models not yet relesased...
That is for the 5Gb PC iPod (for a friend of mine), of course I have had my own Mac iPod for more than a year now.
Does these things come with nethack?
If they do, they need much more than 10 days of battery time in order to complete the game.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
My biggest issue is having my iPod not start back up after pausing & locking it. It "starts playing" but is just locked. Reset to fix.
It only takes a few seconds, but it's annoying. Maybe 1.2.6 will help out in that area, too.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
5.2 MB! As if that's not crazy, there's a Gzip file that expands to 51 MB inside that. Most of it seems to be absorbed in different languages. That's 8-12 songs worth of space, though.
Also, couldn't this have been available via Software Update? I don't spend much time at the iPod homepage. I suppose not everyone needs it, but couldn't there be some way of telling if you ever had an iPod connected? Wishful thinking, maybe.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Was an occasional bug in the battery monitor a deal breaker keeping you from an ipod? You must be very demanding in other aspects of your life. ;-)
Downloaded, about to take the plunge. The Changelog is minimialist;
Changes since 1.2:
Version 1.2.6 has improved battery management, providing the following updates:
* Increased playback time on scroll-wheel iPods
* Longer stand-by time for all iPods
Looks like it is a definite must for owners of the lower capacity pods.
I see in other places that it does not implement the cursed EEC mandated volume lowering, so don;t let that hold you back.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
I updated my 10 GB Mac iPod, and the updating process went smoothly. I have had no problems with the update. So go ahead and update. You should however always make backups if you want to be sure.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
That's why iTunes has that "Connect to Internet when needed" option. It's so that when you sync your iPod the iPod can send its latest batch of results to seti@home and download new work to do.
After updating my firmware the last time (from 1.1 to 1.2) I noticed a significant reduction in standby time. I did some research and found that the inclusion of a clock was the culprit: the iPod was never designed to keep time using a small power trickle in the same way that say, a digital watch, or your PC, is able to keep time without requiring a massive battery. The solution was to revert to v. 1.1 of the firmware and I got my standby life back.
Does anyone know if the new firmware removes the clock feature? Personally I have no real desire to upgrade: I don't need any more functions from the device - I only need it to play tunes and that's it.
- Occasionally shuts down when shoving the remote-control into the jack. I have to smoothly press it it.
- Said remote-controls connection is finnicky. I have to press it into place a bit too often if I have it in my pocket.
- The clock is some archaic system with letters instead of the standard 24-hour clock used in most parts of the world.
None of these are deal-breakers though. I just love my 20 GB iPod. Bring on AAC already Apple!
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
I keep my iPod up to date but it's running 1.2.1 what happened to the missing versions? I know that there was a 1.2.2 to stop deafening the French but what about the others?
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
* Increased playback time on scroll-wheel iPods
:-(
* Longer stand-by time for all iPods
Since battery life has improved for the mechanical scroll wheel iPods, as well as for all around standby time for all iPods, does that mean iPods with the mechanical scroll wheel now have better battery life than the new ones? Or were they behind before and now they are caught up?
In any case, I like the mechanical scroll wheel better. It feels more precise to me. Except that it gets craps stuck under it on the sides.
I have been using my Ipod sporadically for a while. One very annoying thing is that when you havn't recharced it for a few days, and want to go for a run, the battary is dead.
I was never exactly able to figure out how long my standby time was, but it seemed short enough that I was considering contacting apple about it (3 days perhaps..).
What have other readers found as their standby time using the older firmware versions?
There are good reasons not doing so:
Beautiful would be an automatic Internet Check performed through iTunes whenever an iPod is connect and an internet link is active. Then only required data should be loaded, because I don't nead French and so on... (native German speaker)
So this is were they put the lost battery life from the iBooks!
aaargh will you people stop spreading the urban myth of a dual processor iPod.
The 'second processor' is not a second processor. in fact it's not a processor at all, it's simply a logic array that happens to be made by the same manufacturer as the real CPU.
repeat after me
"apple do not sell ipods to make clusters from"
PLEASE- OGG, AAC (mpeg-2 & mpeg-4), mp3pro and MPC support.
iTunes LAME plug-in (and those presets), Accerator (for mp4/aac experimenting) and Audion (mp3pro for spoken word/audio books) all help, but iPods restrictions keep me from fully taking the sound to the next level.
Please Apple live up to the openness you're stating with OS X. Have your music device be as agnostic with sound as your OS is with fonts, etc.
I use an iBook with OS X, and a Linux machine.
Recently I acquired a iee1394 PCI card, and used the conversion tool from iPod-on-Linux to transform it into a FAT32 iPod, and gtkpod to manage songs on it.
The conversion tool installed firmware 1.2.1, but this last iPod upgrade wanted to reformat my iPod. So now I had a 1.2.6 iPod, but HFS+ instead of FAT32.
Never to lose courage, I copied the 'Firmware' file from inside the upgrader's directory on the Mac to the PC, over the 1.2.1 firmware used in the conversion tool. Run the conversion tool again, and now I have a 1.2.6 FAT32 iPod, and I'm filling it up again using gtkpod.
dakkar - mobilis in mobile
I bought an ipod with the sole intention of trying to get it to work with linux. I run the latest stable 2.4.20 kernel and my firewire stuff works with all my drives (as best as FW -can- with linux, but that's another story).
I can see the files when I mount the ipod and copy them across ok - I think. but when I play them, the file sizes are wrong and so a song that says its 30minutes (unlikely) cuts off after a few minutes and some songs that are long cut off too short! weird.
so I returned it. it appears that for me, at least, ipod/linux is not nearly ready for prime time. too bad.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Hold down the Play button.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
But as we all know it doesn't really switch off the iPod. It's still consuming battery power at a prodigious rate. I want a real off button so I can leave my iPod off for a month and expect it to work the moment I switch it on. Why can't it just dump out its state to disk and shut down for real?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
- Power the LCD
- Save the RAM state
- Maintain the clock
I tend to skip lots of songs, so I get less playtime because I'm forcing the HD to keep spinning up. But I also have a first version 5Gig and my battery life is barely over an hour at this point. Figures I got a Dr. Bott auto charger last week! When I first got it, I was able to get a solid 10+ hours. I'll have to see how much this update improves things.Batteries lose power on their own, especially the lithium and nickel-metal hydrides. Leave a rechargable battery sitting for a month and it'll slowly drain.
Of course, it's pretty unresaonble that the battery drains in standby over a few days. Hopefully this update fixes that.
Oddly I've heard this question three times in the last two weeks, but only four times total in the 16 months I've owned an iPod.
Anyway, my preferred method is to hit PAUSE then lock the unit (the sliding switch on top). Fastest method I know of, includes locking the device so it won't be turned on again by accident, and it only takes two minutes for the iPod to shut itself down.
And with this new update we hopefully won't have to worry about those two minutes killing our battery.
This is Slashdot - ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which we will not put.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Press and hold down the play button for about two seconds and the iPod will immediately turn off.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
Yeah I'll probably get modded down for this, and no-one will see it, but here is a lone voice of dissent warning you about the perils of buying an iPod and about just how stupid they can be at Apple Customer Support.
I wrote some of the documentation for the PP5002C and PP5003 chips used in the iPod when I worked for Portal Player last year.
In fact, the chip IS a dual ARM7 core with supporting I/O logic. So it is you, in fact, who is mistaken.