Is Stanza battery demanding?

Wed, 03/25/2009 - 13:10 — Gealthem

I have recently bought an ipod Touch and am delighted to have discovered Stanza. However I am dissapointed with the way my battery runs down (from full to nearly flat in about three and a half hours reading). I wonder whether this normal or whether my ipod has a problem.
I would love some comments.

Thu, 11/19/2009 - 19:55 — Michael Roegner

Battery Life

Sammy - The batteries in the iPod Touch are not removable or replaceable. Your test is not
one that can actually be implemented without gutting your iPod.

In answer to the question, 3-4 hours of reading time is just about normal. The constraining
factor here isn't the CPU's power consumption, but rather the cost of running the backlit display.
When playing music the screen is allowed to go dormant, but the CPU is still spinning away. And
in that mode, I get over 25 hours of audio playback on a single battery charge. If I bring up a
program that keeps the display lit up and active, the battery will die in less than 4 hours.

Fri, 11/20/2009 - 09:34 — withak

I think you should be able to

I think you should be able to get more than 3-4 hours that if you make sure the brightness is as low as you can stand. And like someone else already said, turning off wifi conserves power also.

Sat, 12/05/2009 - 04:05 — paulpeer

Try white on black.

You could try white characters on a black background. A black background uses 15 % less energy than a white one (said Mark Ontkush, "green" computer consultant).

Thu, 11/19/2009 - 13:40 — sammy

You can only answer this by

You can only answer this by trying two types of batteries. If the second battery set runs down the same as the first then it's obvious that your Ipod is demanding. If there is a clear life difference between the two types of batteries then you have Stanza to blame.

Fri, 08/07/2009 - 06:51 — DSpider

I was wondering the same

I was wondering the same thing. If Stanza uses (more) battery power than other readers, mainly because I think that page turning effect uses more resources than a simple page switch. Is Stanza optimized for lower CPU power consumption ? At what CPU speed ? I know that Wifi/Bluetooth, the screen and CPU are the most power hungry functions on most (if all) portable devices (ie. PSP, PDAs, mobile phones, etc). What are Stanza's technical specifications from that point of view ? Or are they trade secrets or something ?

Fri, 08/07/2009 - 08:14 — support

We don't have any specific

We don't have any specific energy consumption specs, but generally speaking, occasional simple animations (like our page turning) will be much less power hungry than, say, a graphically intensive video game. You can always disable the page turning animations (in the settings you can get to by tapping the gears icon in the book's toolbar) and see if that helps your battery life. For the best savings, though, probably enabling airplane mode on your device will probably yield the greatest benefit.

Fri, 08/07/2009 - 09:06 — DSpider

"Airplaine mode" as in no

"Airplaine mode" as in no wifi and no bluetooth ? Yes, that's why I asked at what CPU frequency the app is running. More out of curiosity.

Wed, 08/05/2009 - 15:24 — simons

Well to me this is not

Well to me this is not normal. You can have your battery checked at Jackson Electrician. I had a similar problem but my battery wasn't a stanza one. I had it fixed there and now it give battery life of over 5 hours.

Wed, 05/13/2009 - 08:28 — withak

Just having the screen lit up

Just having the screen lit up for long periods of time uses a lot of power compared to listening to music with the screen off. Turning the brightness down will use less power, but I'm not sure if it makes enough difference to matter.

If you are doing things that involve leaving the screen on for long periods of time then stanza should be a lot better for battery life than most games because games will be doing work on the cpu pretty heavily in addition to lighting up the screen. I think stanza would be far less cpu-intensive than most games are. Even web browsing will be the same story, safari probably requires a little more cpu work than stanza, but also uses the wifi antenna a lot which takes power.

Wed, 03/25/2009 - 13:33 — Emily

We have done a lot of testing

We have done a lot of testing to see how Stanza affects battery life, and it's unlikely that Stanza would be responsible for draining your battery that quickly. While you are actually reading with Stanza, there's not much going on that would be draining your battery except lighting up the screen, which would be happening anyway if you were using your iPod.

When you are reading with Stanza, do you have your wifi turned on? Do you "push" to check your email? If so, that might be making your battery run out quickly.

You might also want to reboot your iPod. Perhaps you just need to terminate some OS process that is running in the background that is taking up a lot of battery.

If that doesn't help, you might actually have something wrong with your battery. Three hours is really fast for the battery to run down, unless you are playing some super processor-intensive game.

Wed, 05/13/2009 - 07:20 — Daved314 (not verified)

Me too

I have the same problem too. My battery runs down very very quickly while using stanza. I don't have wireless turned on or have any other applications running in the background (no push or anything). My iPod used to last for weeks without a charge... now I'm lucky if it lasts 2 days (if I'm reading a text).

I wonder if the size of the book makes a difference? How much it has to store in memory, etc.