Extend your iPod listening pleasure
When working with a digital media player such as a video iPod, some things become apparent. How? They don’t last forever. Batteries die. Charging them can be a hassle and a huge time consumer. This can be a bother, especially if you are charging them once a day. If this is a problem for you, here are some easy tips to help you make your iPod battery last longer.
The key in life is moderation – First thing that people become aware of when using an iPod, is that they have tons of features. Although it’s fun to use features like the Stop Watch, playing games, and using the calendar, they do take up battery life. This is not saying that you can never use those features, but the key to prolonging any battery life whether it be for an iPod or anything else is to moderate those features. If you use them all at once, you’re torturing the battery and it will necessitate replacing the battery sooner than later. Using those features in moderation and not all at once can be the key in having to either replace a battery for the iPod, which can be a hassle in itself, or buying a new one.
Keep them turned off – When playing music on an iPod, whether it be for exercising, or listening to it on the bus; sometimes it’s cool to let your iPod do all the thinking and play songs on shuffle or repeat. That’s what it’s there for, after all.
However, even though it’s fine to do that, keep in mind that those features can be the biggest battery drainer of all. If you have the Shuffle (not to be confused with the iPod Shuffle music player) and Repeat options turned on at the same time, the hard drive that stores all your songs is working overtime to keep up. Each time a song is loaded and played, the hard drive is working, and like all hard drives, it needs power.
If the hard drive has to kick in and start up every few minutes for a song change, that startup time wastes a lot of battery life. If the hard drive can’t get enough power to power up and give you another song, then it shuts down, and you need to recharge the battery. So to help prolong the recharge cycle of your battery, use those features, but not at the same time. You can use the Repeat option turned on and create playlists in iTunes to shuffle the songs for you. You can turn these options on or off in the Settings menu on your iPod itself.
Turn off the light – With the newer iPods, the screen with the backlight off, gets extremely dark and hard to see in any light conditions. Previous generations of iPods did not have this problem, and you could get away with not using the backlight at all. However, this has changed and also is a drain on your battery life.
On your iPod menu, go to Settings and select Backlight Timer. You can set the Back-light to go off after either 2, 5, 10, 15, or 20 seconds, or you can have the back-light always on or off. Never keep it always on. If you set the timer to around 10 or 15 seconds, that does help the battery to not waste a lot of energy on the screen. Reducing the brightness when watching a video on your iPod will also help to extend your battery life a bit. Apple also released a firmware update for the 5th and 6th generation video iPods which also helps extend battery life.
If you follow those steps, your iPod battery will live a long and happy life. At least until a newer iPod comes out.
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