The battery one the NX70V REALLY SUCKS !!!!

[aphoebic]

MAN ! I had an N760c for 14 months, never had a problem, i could listen to mp3s during a whole transtlantic flight while reading ebooks and playing games ! a few days ago my NX70v dropped me out after 3 hours !!!!! What da hell did they do to the stamina technology battery ???!!!
I was so satisfied with this unit now im considering an NX73v or 80v... damn !

[JoshW]

Originally posted by aphoebic
MAN ! I had an N760c for 14 months, never had a problem, i could listen to mp3s during a whole transtlantic flight while reading ebooks and playing games ! a few days ago my NX70v dropped me out after 3 hours !!!!! What da hell did they do to the stamina technology battery ???!!!
I was so satisfied with this unit now im considering an NX73v or 80v... damn !

For what it's worth, I drive an hour to work and an hour and 20 minutes home each day. I've listened to MP3's on my NX80 both directions the entire time, looked up contacts, schedules appointments, played some games and read AvantGo for 30 minutes, and I return home with the battery between 75 and 80 per cent remaining.

The battery on the NX73 and NX80 is outstanding.

I'll be going away for two days this weekend, and have no concerns that the battery will die during my short trip.

[cbulock]

I've found the battery on my NX60 to be great. I can ususally use it up to five or six hours without getting any low battery errors. Just make sure to have the display shut off while listening to MP3's (either by using the Hold button, or shutting the clamshell). If you leave the screen on, the playback won't last quite as long.

[filegrabber]

The battery life is excellent on them. I know what aphoebic's saying though- when you move from an N760 it does seem poor for a while but you get used to it.

[n2ifp]

Right, but moving to the NX80 gives back the longer battery life!;)

[filegrabber]

The NX80 battery life is less than the NX70 though.

[n2ifp]

Originally posted by filegrabber
The NX80 battery life is less than the NX70 though.

What??

The NX80 is almost double the life over my NX70?

Even the published specs are better for the NX80 14 days vs 10 days for the NX70.

 

[williepalm]

I think he must have got it wrong.

[Perk]

Originally posted by aphoebic
MAN ! I had an N760c for 14 months, never had a problem, i could listen to mp3s during a whole transtlantic flight while reading ebooks and playing games ! a few days ago my NX70v dropped me out after 3 hours !!!!! What da hell did they do to the stamina technology battery ???!!!
I was so satisfied with this unit now im considering an NX73v or 80v... damn !

If you haven't done so already turn your screen brightness down to about 40%. This will increase battery life and does not make a dramatic difference in the screen. I have an NX70 and can handle a coast to coast flight with out any problem.

[LeggNet]

Originally posted by williepalm
I think he must have got it wrong. No, Shaun really feels this way about the 80's battery life. Check out his review here:

http://www.clieuk.co.uk/nx80v.shtml

Cheers, Rich

[gnlew]

I think the battery life comments are due to the specific way you use your device. If you spend a lot of time commuting, you will put a strain on your device. I have found that my challenges relate to the use of Netfront and the WL100. That does drain the battery quickly. I have used Audio player with intermittent use of the datebook, memo and pyramid solitaire with good results into the three hour range. After that the battery still had about 50% from what I can remember.

Hey Josh, if you had a charging cable at the office and the cradle at home, your NX70 would have plenty of juice for the drive. By the way, you aren't driving and reading eBooks at the same time are you??

[patrickl]

if you listen to mp3, switch the NX70 to hold and you'll have plenty running time. Even without that Iget around 5 to 6 hours running with normal use (datebook / e-books).

[williepalm]

I get about 8 to 9 hours on my NX80.

[dúnadan]

The N-series blows away any other CLIE series (or color Palm for that matter) in the battery life arena. It's good to see Sony moving back towards making battery life a priority.

[filegrabber]

"No, Shaun really feels this way about the 80's battery life. Check out his review here:

http://www.clieuk.co.uk/nx80v.shtml

Cheers, Rich"

I am slightly amending that with tonights article which will be uploaded later- there is NO way that the NX80 battery life is double that of the NX70.

I have the NX screen brightness at it's lowest (great screen allows that) and for standard daily use at work, games, MP3 etc. it is definately less on mine compared to my old NX70.

Just my experience of both machines :)

[TinyMog]

The battery life of the NX60/70 and the NX73/80 are about the same :cool: .

[Unregistered]

guess it just proves you won't know how your battery life will be until you shell out a lot of money :).

[r0b456]

You guys must have defective NX80's then because mine lasts for EVER. I moved over from an HP 1910, which was pretty limited in that it only had a 900mAh battery. But it was still OK to listen to Mp3's for a little while so long as I turned the screen off.

Just yesterday I had to work a 10 hour shift at work. I listened to Mp3's (on Hold) for about 2 hours, went to lunch. Added some info to Handy Shopper. Poked around while waiting for my food. Went back to work, entered some contact info. I played some more music, oh Hold, for about 1 1/2 hours while running some reports. Later on I played a couple races in GTS, several puzzles in Mummy Maze, and some Bejeweled. I finished up work and then stopped by Target to pick up those items that I wrote down in handy shopper. I kept my NX80 ready while I shopped, so I could check items off as I picked them up. After shopping, I went over to Chili's to pick up some dinner to go. While waiting, I played some more games and backed up my NX80 to it's memory stick. Before I put it away, I checked my battery -- 72%. This is the lowest I have ever had it. But when I looked back, I realized that I had done a lot with it. My 1910 iPAQ would surely be hanging on to it's last little bit of charge by then.


Does the NX80 have the best battery life of any PDA? No, but it's pretty great. The best of any PDA I've own to date. I don't know what battery life was like on the N760. but I know that the NX70/60 units were really criticized for having poor battery life. Just about every review for the NX80/73 that I have seen have specifically stated better battery life over previous NX models.

If your NX70 is besting your NX80 in battery life, you may have a bad NX80.

[stronggeek]

Originally posted by filegrabber
The NX80 battery life is less than the NX70 though.

A yeah, this is not true.

I'm doing the same things I did with the NX70 and more and I never find myself racing to the cradle as I did with my NX70.

My NX80 an go 2-3 days with haeavy use!

My NX70 would barely make it to 1 day.

There must be some defective units out there for "longer battery life" was one of my primary reasons for upgrading to the NX80!

[filegrabber]

A lot of this depends on what machine you upgraded from- I had an iPAQ 1910 and it's battery life was poor, I also had an NX70 which was excellent for battery life. It's all about perception sometimes- moving from an N7 series will automatically be disappointing because their batteries lasted forever and it will be good if you move from most Pocket PCs because on the whole they are not good battery wise.

A few people have emailed me through PDANews who upgraded from an NX70 and ALL of them mentioned the poor battery life on the NX80. stronggeek- maybe you have the faulty machine? (it's a good fault to have though:))

[williepalm]

Unless I have a faulty machine too. My NX80 could last me for days without recharge. Definitely much better than the 70.

[bogart]

Rolands let me know of a battery extender you can get on e-bay for 5.99..... It charges the battery and extends the battery, apparently a sony one is $30?. I have just ordered one... great for long flights etc. and you won't have to think about the battery at all. It's supposedly 5 times the juice!. p.s. the sucker is very! small and holds 4 batteries !

[n2ifp]

Originally posted by stronggeek


A yeah, this is not true.

I'm doing the same things I did with the NX70 and more and I never find myself racing to the cradle as I did with my NX70.

My NX80 an go 2-3 days with haeavy use!

My NX70 would barely make it to 1 day.

There must be some defective units out there for "longer battery life" was one of my primary reasons for upgrading to the NX80!

Hi Paul,

I can't believe this, in fact I am astonished! There is NO CONTEST between the NX70 and the NX80. I get more than double my WiFi time alone over the NX70.

The NX80's battery has more capacity, 1200ma vs the NX70's 1000ma.

The new PXA263 Intel Strata-Flash all-in-one chip and processor is much more energy efficient over the older PXA250 used in the NX70.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20030324net.htm

I think someone is playing a game with us?:mad:

[stronggeek]

Originally posted by n2ifp


Hi Paul,

I can't believe this, in fact I am astonished! There is NO CONTEST between the NX70 and the NX80. I get more than double my WiFi time alone over the NX70.

The NX80's battery has more capacity, 1200ma vs the NX70's 1000ma.

The new PXA263 Intel Strata-Flash all-in-one chip and processor is much more energy efficient over the older PXA250 used in the NX70.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20030324net.htm

I think someone is playing a game with us?:mad:

No doubt Larry!

I indeed thought there was a joke involved! :)

That's why I piped down a little.

I'm glad you, williepalm and the others were here to let aphoebic  in on what's really "crackin" with NX80 and it's battery life!

And we've got the data and the "real life" use to prove battery life is much improved with the NX80.

And as I stated before, extended battery life was a huge consideration for me too upgrade to the NX80.

And as big as the NZ90 is, if it had had the same battery life as the NX80 I probably would have (choke) went there first. :)

I just want aphoebic  to be able to make an informed decision.

filegrabber, I don't doubt your experiences with the NX80 you had (perhaps you and some of the others truly had a defective unit) and I respect your opinion, but honestly, there are many posts on the subject of longer battery life for the NX80.

[Unregistered]

fan boys strike again

[stronggeek]

Originally posted by Unregistered
fan boys strike again

Now I do like fans... sort of ....when it's hot and there's no central air to be found, but in any case if you were addressing me, I'd like you to know that I would prefer to be called a fan man.

Thank You

[rob_squared]

You know, when almost everyone is having different results than you, guess what? You might be WRONG!

[r0b456]

Fanboyism aside, I think there are some serious abnormalities in these units. It's not just 1 or 2 people claiming things against the norm. Several people state that their NX80's get great battery life. But several people claim the NX80 gets abysmal battery life.


So who's right?
Is it really just a matter of Great Expectations?
Is it Fanboyism?
Are there two different batches of NX80 going around?


Let's look at what the reviewers think:


Brighthand
In the past, the Clie line developed a bad reputation for short battery lives. This is an area Sony has made a lot of progress in and the NX80V's is more than acceptable.

I haven't been able to discover what the exact capacity of the battery is but it must be fairly high. Wi-Fi is a notorious power drain and, with very heavy use of the Wi-Fi card (e.g. on the Web almost the whole time) I'm getting 4 or 5 hours of use. This is about twice what I'm used to with my Toshiba e550g with a Wi-Fi card and comparable with the Palm Tungsten C.

With only occasional Wi-Fi use, the battery life shoots up to several days and if you don't have a Wi-Fi card, you could probably use the NX80V for close to a week between charges.

The second biggest battery drain is the backlight for the screen. I typically kept this at about half its maximum. You can extend the battery life even more by turning this down to the minimum setting, at which the screen still looks pretty good.

One of the nice features of the Clie line is you can switch the screen off while listening to MP3s, which saves on power. I've listened to the audio player for several hours this way and seen the battery meter barely budge.


PDA Buyers Guide
Battery life is great for a Palm OS PDA with this many features and a CCD camera. I played games for an hour, viewed docs with Picsel Viewer, and took 30 pictures (about half with the capture light) and a video, and the battery dropped only 3%! It's better than the older NX and NR PDA models. If you use the optional WiFi card, then battery life depends on how much time you spend online. I surfed for an hour and used up 25% of the charge. . As with most PDAs, certain functions and hardware items are disabled when the power drops below a certain level. The Sony NZ and new NX models are the only ones that tell you what gets turned off when: the CF slot is turned off at 20%, the Memory Stick slot is turned off at 10%, Multimedia playback and record are disabled at 15% and the capture light is disabled at 25%. The battery is not user-replaceable.


But then you have:

Bargain PDA
I was rather disappointed in the performance of the 1200 milliamp-hour battery on the NX80. Even on relatively miserly settings, with the backlight on minimum and a moderate amount of CPU activity, I barely managed 4 and a quarter hours of use. Considering that other Palms with 25% smaller batteries can go much longer than that at maximum drain, the NX80 is a rather poor performer.


However, CNet had even worse performance than Bargainpda.com:

CNet
The included lithium battery, which is rechargeable and, thankfully, removable, offered average life. With the screen brightness at 50 percent, the CLIE ran a Kinoma Player movie for 3 hours, 21 minutes before the juice ran out. This is a reasonable performance, considering that the large display is a power hog and that playing video and sound taxes system resources. You can maximize battery life by minimizing backlight use.


BargainPDA.com ran stress tests on their unit, and got 3 hours 40 minutes of run time by using the NX80 at full brightness while looping MP3 playback. However, CNet ran the display at only 50% brightness while playing highly compressed video and only got 3 hours and 20 minutes. Decoding compressed video may require a bit more power from the CPU than decompressing MP3 audio, but everyone will agree that the biggest power drain on the NX series is it's display. It's gorgeous, but at a price. By dropping the brightness by Half, CNet should have achieved quite a bit more performance from their unit than BargainPDA did.

And going back to the Brighthand review, which have always been reliable, Ed noted that he was able to get 4 to 5 hours of heavy WiFi use. Anyone here can tell you that whether it's a PDA or a Notebook, it takes a lot of juice to power the radio used in WiFi devices.



So you have four different reviews, in which four different people all get different results testing the same model of PDA. One of them is glowing, the other puts it at "Average", and the other puts it quite low. Some of it may be attributed to having a preconceived notion of something, and then having a positive or negative opinion based not only actual real world performance, but on that reaction based on that preconceived notion. However, that can only explain some of it. When it comes to really comparing their measured performance, you can't really argue with the numbers.

I guess that, in the end, all I really care about is my own performance. My NX80 gets excellent performance. I can get what I would consider very heavy use and still have plenty of charge left. I charge my PDA every night once I get home, but I'm convinced I could probably go 2 or 3 days without charging my NX80. Or purchase the Sony WiFi card and get a whole day of heavy PDA useage and still have plenty of juice for repeated WiFi use.

For potential NX80 buyers looking to get the straight scoop on NX80 battery performance, all I can tell you is "Your mileage may vary".



-Rob

[YTTAN]

Originally posted by n2ifp


Hi Paul,

I can't believe this, in fact I am astonished! There is NO CONTEST between the NX70 and the NX80. I get more than double my WiFi time alone over the NX70.

The NX80's battery has more capacity, 1200ma vs the NX70's 1000ma.

The new PXA263 Intel Strata-Flash all-in-one chip and processor is much more energy efficient over the older PXA250 used in the NX70.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20030324net.htm

I think someone is playing a game with us?:mad:

Totally agree with n2ifp.
As it is one of the main reason I downgrade from NZ90 when compared with NX80.

I used to take about 5-10 photos the most on weekend with my child around on NZ.

But now I can easily take 100 shots per days on her as the NX80 battery never give me a single irrating battery low warning which is greatly affect my mood to take a shot. Although, only 50% I will keep as most of the time I took are candid shots, tends to have duplicate photos.

Although, I had F707 and F717 5mega cameras, but I used them for big events/occasions/tours only. So this NX80 become a very handy camera cum pda(eg. email/net/html reader) cum MP3(use only during traveling to work)

[YTTAN]

Originally posted by n2ifp


Hi Paul,

I can't believe this, in fact I am astonished! There is NO CONTEST between the NX70 and the NX80. I get more than double my WiFi time alone over the NX70.

The NX80's battery has more capacity, 1200ma vs the NX70's 1000ma.

The new PXA263 Intel Strata-Flash all-in-one chip and processor is much more energy efficient over the older PXA250 used in the NX70.

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20030324net.htm

I think someone is playing a game with us?:mad:

Totally agree with n2ifp.
As it is one of the main reason I downgrade from NZ90 when compared with NX80.

I used to take about 5-10 photos the most on weekend with my child around on NZ.

But now I can easily take 100 shots per days on her as the NX80 battery never give me a single irrating battery low warning (still have more than 80% left from 100% which is greatly affect my mood to take a shot. Although, only I will keep 50%of it as most of the time I took are candid shots, tends to have duplicate photos.

Although, I had F707 and F717 5mega cameras, but I used them for big events/occasions/tours only. So this NX80 become a very handy camera cum pda(eg. email/net/html reader) cum MP3(use only during traveling to work)

[YTTAN]

I had NX70 before but even it had only 0.3 mega cam, it still doesn't save much batt life. But I can still manage to use MP3 for 5-6 hours without any warning.

[filegrabber]

I think r0b456 summed it up well. Not sure what it is but there must be something odd about different batches of the NX80. It's unusual to hear people have different experiences with a new machine, especially when moving up from the same one.

No one will change their views on how their machines perform so perhaps our machines are just different- shame mines one of the lemons :(

[patrickl]

I'm pretty sure it's all a matter of backlightsettings and to a lesser degree types of use. I'll bet playing kinoma movies is the heaviest usage of the NX80 you can imagine. So if it gets close to 4 hours of usage doing that I'd say that's pretty good.

Running BenchMark 2 gave it values of between 2:30 (backlight full and full power) and with backlight off it would get close to 7 hours. I guess something similar can happen with an NX too. This might even effect the NX more from Palm PDA's due to the larger screen.

Maybe people could use BatteryBench2 (http://my.vector.co.jp/servlet/System.FileDownload/download/http/0/176278/pack/other/pilot/hardware/bbench2.zip) to test their NX80? If you use the same settings you can at least compare to see if there are differences between batches.

There are some old results here (http://euroclie.free.fr/Uk/batbnch.html). It show an N series Clie with over 13 hours (with backlight minimum).

[filegrabber]

I have the backlight on zero with the NX80 due to the screen brightness and when using it at work for contacts, meetings, emails etc. I get home with roughly 70%.

The NX70 never went below 100% on a work day- exactly the same usage for both machines.

I wonder of their is a varience with the backlight control- the NX80 is brighter at zero than the NX70 at over half ?

[acraniotes]

This is quite an interesting thread... It would seem that Sony has really dropped the ball in terms of QC these days -- particularly with the NX80s. From what I've read up until now, depending on the model you received, you might wind up with an insensitive screen, or an unusable keyboard (keys too flush, no tactile feedback). I guess we can add poor battery life to the mix...


Now, I'm not here to rub it in, but rather to impart my own experiences so as to provide would-be purchasers with some additional perspective. So far, in the week that it's been in my possession, the NX80 has met all of my expectations. The screen is responsive (thought certainly "harder" than my old NR), the keyboard works great, and the battery life is has been surprisingly good. To wit, yesterday I was surfing via WiFi (powersave disabled) for about an hour with the screen on High for about half that time (before I turned it down to 50%), read AvantGo front to back (10 channels), used PalmReader for about a half an hour, and listened to some mp3s for about 40mins (mostly with the screen on hold, and, for a while in the background while surfing). My battery dropped to 63% before I replaced it in its cradle. That's pretty impressive in my book, and certainly more than I expected. Clearly, ymmv, but if Sony was paying attention to the store, it wouldn't by much. It's one thing to open the box and check the screen and the keyboard, it's another thing entirely to check the battery...

I'd be curious to hear what other NX80 users out there have to say about this "new" issue that has cropped up. Like Stronggeek, one of the features that drew me to the NX80 was its improved battery life relative to the 1st gen NXs and NRs. I know I would have been sorely disappointed to find it was less efficient in this regard.

-Adam

[n2ifp]

Hmm, until Shaun had mentioned this, I didn't know there was a problem. There are two NR70's and two NX70's plus the NX80 at my location. Battery life on those 4 units are all about equal. None of them can compare to the NX80, except for the N760C that I still have.

Now with that being said, I remember reading that the battery is essentially the same as the one used in the NZ90 without the smarts. Maybe that has something to do with it. The NZ90 had a rash of battery problems or were perceived as having such. Many exchanged their NZ90 and most were satisfied afterwards.

From experience with my NX80, the battery life should be superior to the NX60/70 units. If not, then there is something wrong, so it should be replaced.

The screen on the NX80 is quite bright, even at the minimum setting(1%) and it's still brighter than the NX70 is at 50% brightness level.

Using WiFi on the NX70, I could barely squeak 90 minutes time, where the NX80 ran almost 4.0 hours. The battery life of the NX70 usually ran 1.5 to 5.0 hours depending on how it was used, but it was right in line with Sony's specs.

Bottom line, if your NX73/80 has a short battery life, then there is something wrong.

Additionally, in the beginning, some of the very first NX73's had digitizer issues.

[filegrabber]

I really must have a lemon- crap keys (very flush), insensitive screen and battery life which is OK but not as good as the NX70 :()

I phoned Sony though:)- http://www.clieuk.co.uk/pdathoughts.htm

[stronggeek]

Originally posted by filegrabber
I really must have a lemon- crap keys (very flush), insensitive screen and battery life which is OK but not as good as the NX70 :()

I phoned Sony though:)- http://www.clieuk.co.uk/pdathoughts.htm

Shaun, my keys are sort of flush also and my screen was more insensitive than my othre units as well, but I would definitely try another unit if possible.

I'm glad you made the point, because it's buyer beware and really be. (Not for this)

Good Luck with yours.