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Amazon and Barnes & Noble Jostle Over Battery Life Figures for Nook, Kindle

Posted by timothy on from the they-last-forever-in-heaven dept.

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.'"

13 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. How About ... by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about stating the battery life in actual hours of continuous use instead of estimated days based on estimated usage? Is that really so hard?

    1. Re:How About ... by SquirrelDeth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes from a marketing point of view. It's a game to see who can come up with the longest battery time using the most convoluted methods to sell the product its better to sell a product and have a disappointed customer than not sell a product. Chances they wouldn't buy another product any ways.

    2. Re:How About ... by TD-Linux · · Score: 4, Insightful

      On eInk based readers, it's actually harder than that. How many times do you flip the page in an hour? The number of pageflips per charge seems like a better metric.

    3. Re:How About ... by Hope+Thelps · · Score: 5, Informative

      How about stating the battery life in actual hours of continuous use instead of estimated days based on estimated usage? Is that really so hard?

      Pretty hard. The Kindle (and presumably the Nook?) doesn't use battery power to just sit there showing a page while you read it; it only uses power when you turn the page (or connect to WIFI or 3G). The rate at which you need to turn pages (and thus use power) is going to depend on a combination of your reading speed, the nature of the material, and the font size you've set. You can make assumptions for all that but it still really comes down to "estimated usage".

      --
      To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
    4. Re:How About ... by BrokenHalo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:How About ... by marga · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The math is not so simple as that, because these devices waste some battery while on stand-by. So if you don't turn them completely off (which is not usual, due to the painful amount of time it takes to start-up).

      With my nook (first edition), I've found that I can read between 10 to 14 days of aprox. 1 hour a day (about 12 hours of reading), but I can also use it for 3 days of 8 hours a day (about 24 hours of reading) -only feasable on holidays, obviously-. All of this with wireless off, and none of it an exact measurement, just what I've experienced.

      So yes, measuring battery life is hard, it depends a lot on the use you give the device. However, it annoys me that it wastes so much battery on keeping it on stand-by. Maybe they've worked on that for the nook 2, and that's why they are parading their 2 months estimate. Because, with the old nook, it's not true that you can double the amount of days the battery lasts if you halve the amount of hours you read.

      --
      Margarita Manterola.
    6. Re:How About ... by halivar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:How About ... by ReptilianSamurai · · Score: 3, Funny

      How about battery life in percentages of Libraries of Congress that can be read on a single charge?

      --
      I installed Linux on a car, but it crashed due to bad drivers...
  2. Re:Half hour a day? by halivar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Jesus Christ. by Futile+Rhetoric · · Score: 4, Funny

    Whoever came up with this comparison chart will be first up against a wall when the revolution comes:

    https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/shasta/photos/image-battery-life.gif

    1. Re:Jesus Christ. by similar_name · · Score: 3, Funny

      Did you know the average human can lift their own body weight (on average about 150 lbs) but I can lift 15,000 lbs*


      *My strength assumes lifting one pound at a time over a one year period.


      By the way, that pic should be some kind of statistical goatse. It's disgusting.

  4. My battery life figure for Kindle by cerberusss · · Score: 4, Informative

    I brought my Kindle 3 to China. It's a long flight, so I read a lot in the airplane. A couple of days I read only 30 minutes, and for three days, I stayed in the hostel because I got sick of something I ate. So in those three days, I read up to 6 hours per day. All in all, the holiday lasted 12 days and I had about 25% charge left at the end of the holiday.

    --
    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  5. Re:Shorter the battery life the harder it must be. by Improv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I only have a Kindle, but I have yet to come close to its battery limits. It seems to have a pretty good battery/power draw combination. I imagine the Nook is similar.

    This is, as far as I can tell, just a stupid pissing contest.

    --
    For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.