Amazon and Barnes & Noble Jostle Over Battery Life Figures for Nook, Kindle 160
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.'"
Re:How About ... (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".
My battery life figure for Kindle (Score:5, 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.