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Amazon and Barnes & Noble Jostle Over Battery Life Figures for Nook, Kindle
destinyland writes "Amazon just doubled the reported battery life for their Kindle digital readers — but they did it by cutting the estimated daily usage in half. Monday Amazon's competitor Barnes and Noble released a new touch-screen version of their Nook reader, and C|Net notes that apparently Amazon 'took issue with how its competitor was calculating and presenting its battery life numbers.' When Barnes and Noble claimed that the Nook's charge lasted twice as long based on a half hour a day of usage, Amazon simply recalculated the Kindle's battery life using the same formula. By Wednesday, Barnes and Noble was insisting that the Nook's charge still lasted twice as long as the Kindle's. 'If that's true, then Barnes and Noble mangled the launch of their touch-screen Nook,' reports one Kindle blog, 'by botching their description of one of its main selling points.'"
Myself, I prefer the lower contrast of the Kindle specifically because it most emulates the faded, cheap ink and light bleached paper of your standard paperback novel. I can sit for 8 hour stretches and forget I'm holding an electronic device.
But that's just me.
I don't have first-hand experience of this (yet), but my wife seems to get over 2 weeks between charges on her Sony PRX-650 reader (a birthday present from yours truly). And she gets through books at a prodigious rate - thousands of page-turns per week. It was mainly the fact that the device seems to offer just about the best multi-format support that was the biggest selling point, but power usage seems fairly impressive to me.
Yep. If I leave my Kindle unplugged, and unread, for 3 weeks the charge dies.
But if I leave on vacation for a full week on a full charge, read 4-6 hours/day in the hotel room/beach, and further read for 12 hours worth of flying + delays (the joys of overnight travel coast-to-coast via coach), I get back home with about 20% charge. Not bad, IMHO.